February 13, 2017

"I can’t imagine why, but everyone thinks I’m a genius; but if you ask me, I’m no genius. Just yesterday I was telling them: Please hear me! What sort of a genius am I? And they tell me: What a genius! And I tell them: Well, what kind? But they don’t tell me what kind, they only repeat, genius this and genius that. But if you ask me, I’m no genius at all.Wherever I go, immediately, they all start whispering and pointing their fingers at me. What’s going on here?! I say. But they don’tlet me utter a word, and any minute now they will lift me up in the air and carry me off on their shoulders."

[Daniil Kharms, 1934– 36]

∞

Just a little over a year and a half ago, I had the great pleasure to blog in these pages for my first time, on the occasion of having edited the Contemporary Russian Poetry issue of the Atlanta Review (Spring 2015). When I wrote David Lehman, almost exactly a year ago now, to tell him that my first full book, Russian Absurd: Daniil Kharms, Selected Writings, was forthcoming early this year from Northwestern University Press, I could not have remotely expected his response, an offer to blog about Kharms and my book, today and for the remainder of this week. And so ... here we are, the book's official release is this Friday, February 17, and I am just back in New York City from yet another overwhelming AWP, this time in Washington, DC that is largely unchanged (other than the construction boom in its Midtown and all the newly gentrified neighborhoods) from that summer of 1984 when, as a budding Sovietologist, I walked every day from my GWU dorm room in Foggy Bottom to my internship at the Georgetown Center for Strategic Studies on 17th and K Street. I had every intention then to pursue a career in the diplomatic service and my special interest was arms control, and though the town is little changed, the world and each one of us in it have been utterly transformed in the space of only several months.

1984: what an exciting year that was for all of us, but especially for those with a keen interest in Russian and East European Studies. In May, the USSR had boycotted the Los Angeles Olympics as payback for the US boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics, all of it, the consequence of the Russian invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. That war, which would become known as "the Soviet Union's Vietnam," was later thought to have been a major factor in the collapse of the USSR. In 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev would inherit the helm as the General Secretary of the CPSU, after the deaths of three septuagenerian leaders within the space of three years (Brezhnev, Andropov, and Chernenko) and the rest, as they say, is history. It seemed, then that the collapse of the Russian Empire was imminent, and that the shape of things to come, as predicted by George Orwell in his eponymous novel was farther away than it had ever been throughout that bloodiest of all, our 20th Century. Some had even gone so far as to diagnose the idyllic 90s as "The End of History". But then, just as the 21st Century had dawned, 9/11 happened, followed by perhaps our own second Vietnam, the War in Iraq and, at the end of its first decade, a market collapse that threatened to spawn a second Great Depression, and now, "seemingly" all of a sudden, history has come back, full circle and with a vengeance, to bite us all in the ass.

No one could have predicted even a year ago, when I signed on for this task, that this book would be as timely, cogent, and once again relevant as I had believed it would be when I began work on it ten years ago, and I myself only know this for certain now. As I had written in my introduction: “Covering the entire range between the merely unpleasant, the disturbing, and the hilarious, [Daniil Kharms's] protoexistentialist works succeed in bearing, if only tangentially, remarkable witness to the unspoken and unspeakable reality of life under Stalin.... Getting Kharms, I think, requires cultivating a visceral sense of the sociopolitical-cultural context of the repressions and deprivations of the 1920s and 1930s, and the suppression of Kharms and his immediate circle, the OBERIU ... [who] had assumed, in their generation, the “Slap in the Face of Public Taste” mantle of the Russian Futurists, literally adopting Kazimir Malevich’s encouragement to them as their motto— 'Go and stop progress!'” And so, before proceeding, I must begin my week-long residency here by first briefly establishing the links between the so-called Russian Absurdists and their spiritual and aesthetic "fathers" of the preceding generation, the Russian Futurians (so-called because they wished to distinguish themselves from the nationalistic and militaristic Italian Futurists).

In preparation for doing so, as we approached the turn of the year, in the run up to the Trump Inauguration and the book's official release, having assumed that most if not nearly all of us are also members of Facebook, I had started a Russian Absurd on Facebook book page, as well as a Russian Absurd on Twitter page and a Goodreads page,) where for the foreseeable future, I will continue posting selections from and news about the book, as well as links to "all things Kharmsian," some of which I will also be sharing here in the coming week. For now, I invite you to explore the following links and to join/like, follow, and share the group with your interested friends. I very much look forward to this, our journey together, as I prepare, as it where, to "take this show on the road" and to read from, i.e. "perform the book" to various and varied kinds of audiences. In my design of the book, I had made a very conscious effort to represent, within my own space constraints (280 pages,) as many of the different types of materials present in his notebooks as possible (diary entries, letters, one of his NKVD confessions, etc.) My main purpose in doing so was to pay particular attention to Kharms’s development as a writer over the short span of some decade and a half of his creative life. So that the development I am speaking of become self-apparent, I structured the book to follow as much as possible a strictly chronological order. The chapters that emerged, corresponding roughly to the “Early,” “Middle,” and “Late” periods, could also have been provisionally titled “The Theatre of Cruelty,” “The Theatre of the Absurd,” and “Protoexistentialism.” The brief "biographical sections," taken from Kharms’s notebooks, etc., and interspersed at the beginning and end of every section, were intended to cement a more personal relationship with the author, as well as to establish connections between his creative output and the circumstances and events of his life. I hoped that these "section breaks" would also provide “pacing” and some "breathing room" as it were, as well as a sense of a "life lived," so that these mileposts in Kharms’s biography could be used by the interested reader to map these events -- the initial suppression of the OBERIU (late 1920s), the breakup of his first marriage and his exile to Kursk after his first arrest (1931–32), and the growing desperation of his final years (late 1930s) -- over to his writing. Kharms’s poetry, like the prose that precedes it, likewise arranged chronologically, placed at the end, offers a kind of summation.

David Bulyuk, a world-class painter and the self-proclaimed "Father of Russian Futurism," spent the second half of his long life in the Ukrainian community of NYC's East Village and, among a group of painters, including Arshile Gorky, in Long Island's Hampton Bays.

Along with Velimir Khlebnikov, whom Roman Jakobson, the father of Structuralist linguistics, had called "perhaps the most important modern poet," no other poet made such a lasting contribution to Russian and World poetry as Vladimir Mayakovsky.

Aleksei Kruchenykh's best known work is the first Russian Futurist Opera, “Victory Over the Sun” (1913,) for which he collaborated with Kazimir Malevich.

Daniil Kharms (photo gallery) was born on December 29, 1905 and died on February 2, 1942. Today, this one last time, we may celebrate his 111th BIRTHDAY and the 75th anniversary of his DEATH.

As I retell in the introduction to my book, the "Russian Absurdists," the Oberiu (“Obyedenenie Real'nogo Iskusstva” or “Union of Real Art,”) were essentially the second generation of Russian Futurists, and their initial "launching pad," Velimir Khlebnikov and his Zaum' (Za-um, literally”beyond the mind, or the “trans-rational). In that spirit, I'd like to offer you these three very short Kharms poems so close in spirit to Khlebnikov's own miniatures, I believe them to have been intended as homages. Of the section of roughly 50 poems that close the book, many, perhaps most of the others are likewise "in this spirit,” and Daniil Kharms, at least in his poetry, remained a “Khlebnikovian” and a “Budetlyanen” (Khlebnikov's “person of the future”) to the end of his life. The Russian Futurian strategy of epatage, or “shocking the bourgeoisie,” was also at the heart of his personal style: in his dress, his dandyism, and particularly in his early, performative, improvisational, expressionistic theatrical work. (The accompanying photo is Daniil Kharms dressed as one of his personas, his "imaginary older brother".)

CHORUS

A cuckoo sleeps in a treeA lobster dreams under a rockIn the field lies a shepherdessAnd the wind is a two-way street.

[1935]

In every church bell there is spiteIn every red ribbon there is fireIn every young woman shiveringIn every young man his own steed

[1936]

I was watching a slowly eyelidthat was being lazily liftedand with its lazy glancecircling the affectionate rivers.

[after August 13, 1937]

∞

ON UNIVERSAL BALANCE

Everyone knows these days how dangerous it is to swallow stones.

One of my acquaintances even coined an expression for it: “Waisty,” which stands for: “Warning: Stone Inside”. And a good thing too he did that. “Waisty” is easy to remember, and, as soon as it comes up, or you need it for something, you can immediately recall it.

Аnd this friend of mine worked as a fireman, that is, as an engine stoker on a locomotive. First he rode the northern lines, then he served on the Moscow route. And his name was Nikolay Ivanovich Serpukhov, and he smoked his own hand-rolled cigarettes, Rocket brand, 35 kopeks a box, and he’d always say he doesn’t suffer from coughing as bad from them, and the five-ruble ones, he says, they make him gag.

And so, it once happened that Nikolay Ivanovich found himself in Hotel Europe, in their restaurant. Nikolay Ivanovich sits at his table, and the table over from him is occupied by some foreigners, and they’re gobbling up apples.

And that’s when Nikolay Ivanovich said to himself: “A curious thing,” Nikolay Ivanovich said to himself, “What an enigma the human being is.”

And as soon as he had said this to himself, out of nowhere, before him appears a fairy and says:

“What is it Good Sir that you desire?”

Well, of course, there’s a commotion at the restaurant, like, where did this little damsel suddenly appear from? The foreigners had even stopped stuffing themselves with apples. Nikolai Ivanovich himself caught a good scare and he says, just for the sake of it, to get rid of her:

“Please, forgive me,” he says, “But there is nothing in particular that I need.”

“You don’t understand,” the mysterious damsel says, “I’m what you call a fairy,” she says. “In a single blink of an eye, I can make for you anything you wish. You just give me the word, and I’ll make it happen.”

That’s when Nikolay Ivanovich notices that some sort of a citizen in a gray suit is attentively listening in on their conversation. The maître d’ comes running in through the open doors and behind him, some other character, with a cigarette dangling out of his mouth.

“What the heck!” Nikolay Ivanovich thinks to himself, “Who the hell knows how this thing will turn out.”

And indeed, no one can understand what is going on. The maître d’ is hopping across the tops, from one table over to another, the foreigners are rolling up all the carpets, and in general, who the hell can tell what’s really going on! Who is capable of what, that is!

Nikolay Ivanovich ran out into the street, forgetting even the hat he’d left behind earlier at the coat check, and he ran out onto LaSalle Street and said to himself: “Waisty! Warning: Stone Inside!” And also: “What haven’t I seen already in this whole wide world!”

And, having returned home, Nikolay Ivanovich said this to his wife:

“Do not be afraid, Ekaterina Petrovna, and do not worry. Only there isn’t any equilibrium in this life. And the mistake is only off by some kilogram and half for the entire universe, but still, it’s amazing, Ekaterina Petrovna, it is simply remarkable!”

THAT’S ALL.

[September 18, 1934]

Previously published in B O D Y.

∞

Daniil Kharms was the pen name of Daniil Ivanovich Yuvachev (1905–1942). With his friend, the poet Alexander Vvedensky, Kharms cofounded the OBERIU, a group of second-generation Russian Futurist or so-called Absurdist writers active in the 1920s and 1930s. Not permitted to publish his mature work in Stalinist Russia, he survived, for a time, by composing poems for children. At the beginning of World War II, he was arrested (a second time) on the absurd charge of espionage and, feigning insanity to avoid summary execution, starved to death in a psychiatric hospital during the Nazi siege of Leningrad. Most of his writings survived only in notebooks, rescued fortuitously from a burned-out building by a friend and fellow OBERIU member, the philosopher Yakov Druskin. His short sketches, illegally circulated in Russia after the war, influenced several generations of underground writers who broke into the mainstream with the fall of the Soviet Union.

“Kharms’s obliquely allegorical dark comedies are both mystical and mythic, Daoist and Dadaist, daring and deranging, surrealist and satiric, metaphysical and metafictional. Charting the experience of everyday life in Russia in the 1920s and ’30s, Kharms is an (anti-)Soviet realist. In a world gone mad, Kharms is, ironically, a last refuge of sanity. Alex Cigale’s sparkling translations bring these works into a new life in English.” – Charles Bernstein, Donald T. Regan Professor of English and Comparative Literature at U. Penn and author of A Poetics, Girly Man, and Pitch of Poetry

"Absurdism — the ridiculous as a reaction and an alternative to revulsion and resignation before an absurd age." – Alex Cigale, 2015 NEA Fellow in Literary Translation, from the Introduction

∞

N.B. An update: After 22 years at the helm, this past year, founding editor Dan Veach passed the reins of the Atlanta Review, to its new editor, Karen Head, and the magazine is now newly affiliated with Georgia Tech University. In the coming year, I will be editing a Baltic Poetry issue of the magazine (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania,) and hope to officially announce it in these pages by the end of this week.

May 24, 2015

Let’s start with the montage of images at the end. There’s Don standing before the mighty Pacific Ocean, a smile on his face, possibly devilish, possibly just a smile. Then there’s Don in a group of a dozen men and women in lotus position receiving the blessings of the morning sunlight and chanting Om. The trinity of images is completed with what is arguably the greatest TV commercial of all time: a chorus of multinational kids singing “I’d like to teach the world to sing / in prefect harmony” and “I’d like to give the world a Coke” and then the tag line, “It’s the real thing!” The commercial made its TV debut in 1971.

The ambiguity of the ending is perfect for our hero, who may, reverting to his character as we’ve come to know it, return to Madison Ave. armed with a new vernacular derived from his experience at Esalen in Big Sur, or wherever Don and Anna Draper’s niece Stephanie have gone for spiritual healing and group therapy. On this view, Don gets to work on the Coke account after all and this is what he comes up with – a good idea made great by the composer and writer of the jingle. (As it happens, McCann Erickson produced the commercial.)

But it is also possible, as no causality is given, that doing such work for Coca-Cola is precisely what our rootless wanderer has renounced in his journey westward – first to Racine (which means “root” in French), Wisconsin, and then to various locales in the Midwest and finally to California, up the coast from LA -- as he discards his property, his clothes, his car, and reaches the ideal nothingness of Existentialism or King Lear from the Fool’s point of view.

Is Om the answer? In that case, as Gertrude Stein would say, what is the question?

I have to interrupt myself. When the commercial came out I was living in Paris. At the time there were commercials before the feature film in Paris movie theaters, and it is was in its French translation, in a Left Bank theater, that I first heard the Coke jingle – “Soif d’aujourd’hui” (“Thirst today” or “Today’s Thirst”) to the tune of “it’s the real thing.” That same year I read Henry James’s story “The Real Thing.” I had the idea of writing a piece comparing the two things, the Coke “real thing” commercial and the James story. I still think it’s a good idea, though I never brought it to fruition.

It was, by the way, a Coke machine that Don fixed in last week’s episode, showing off his mechanical prowess.

A second digression but quicker: how well do I recall the obnoxious encounter groups of the period! Phony, embarrassing, fascistic in their drive toward conformity, power struggles concealed beneath a veneer of gentleness and concern, nasty revelations (“I kidnapped my girlfriend's son and drove past state boundaries”) papered over and always concluding with a plea masked as a query: “Has anyone’s opinion of me gone down?” Ugh.

Back to the finale. I’m glad that happy endings were arranged for some of our favorite folk – Joan, who is sure to make a huge success of her production company that was born in her crowded one-bedroom; Roger, who marries Marie, Megan’s indomitable mother, and who, despite his native xenophobia, orders lobster and champagne in French and jokes that Marie is his Mama; Pete and Trudy, wowed by their new status as Kansas plutocrats as they step into the company plane; and Peg, who gets not just one proposal but two in the course of the episode.

First it is Joan who bends Peggy’s ear with a career-changing offer: a partnership in Harris-Olson, the production company Joan is launching. This must have come as Mannah to the Israelites in the desert who envisioned a sequel to Mad Men focusing on Peggy and Joan in a decade during which the feminist rebellion won its victory.

But Peggy says no to Joan because of an argument made by Stan, the art director who seemed obnoxious when he joined cast and crew but has developed character and complexity over the years. The argument – in the second sense – spurs Stan to declare his love, and come to think of it, they have spent a lot of intimate time together, though mainly on the phone, so why not? Peggy declares right back and it seems a better match for our gal than anyone since Abe before he grew hirsute and self-important and she bought that awful Upper West Side brownstone, which would doubtlessly be worth a large fortune today.

In the very first episode of Mad Men, some of the fellows are going drinking and celebrating with Pete, who is about to get hitched. The well-wishers are Harry Crane, Ken Cosgrove, Paul (the pipe-smoking Princetonian whose lack of talent and charm lead him into the clutches of Hare Krishna), and Sal (the closeted art director who is punished for his homosexuality). This time around it’s a valedictory drink, but only Harry is left of the old guard, and Peggy turns them down when they ask her to join them.

It is not easy to forecast what will happen in the next five to ten years with Peggy, Joan, Pete, and Roger. There are no guarantees that the happy endings just announced will last even a year. As for Betty, doomed though she may be to an early demise, serene though she may be, she remains who she is, smoking cigarettes at the kitchen table.

But with Don the task of making a forecast is impossible. Don is unpredictable by nature, an enigmatic stranger in the cloak and fedora of ordinary if sophisticated urban life. Don’s destiny remains unfixed, though it does seem as though he has come closest to zero in California, at Esalen or its facsimile, and therefore, by this reasoning, he might just be capable of totally revolutionizing his life.

There was a season that began with Don reading The Inferno (John Ciardi’s translation). He has gone to hell and come back many times. There was the time when he lived alone, got drunk nightly, fucked his secretary. There was the time when he fucked his secretary, married her, and cheated on her with the woman who lives downstairs, whose husband is also his friend. And now this. . .two divorces down . . . the merger with McCann. . .the absence of a love life. . . the conviction that he has made a mess of the opportunity he had seized when the explosion went off in Korea.

At Esalen Don reaches the state of aloneness that may precede any life change. Don is deserted and rejected by his faux-niece, Stephanie, who brought him there – and who points out that he is fooling himself if he thinks that she is “family.” There is no exit for him – no car, no way of getting out. He has felt the sting of rejection, or of self-imposed anomie (as the sociologists used to say). He has children but they will not be in his custody. He has had two wives but one is dying and the other may be marvelous but she’s not right for our boy, either because of the age difference between them or because he expected their boss-secretary relationship to persist in their marriage.

What we know about Don is that he is handy, a strong swimmer, good to have in an emergency, favored by fortune in looks, capable of holding his liquor, and liable to act and react to events in thoroughly unpredictable ways. He doesn’t know who he is, but that s because he is a product of his own invention. Like Gatsby he sprang from his Platonic conception of himself. Like William Holden in The Bridge on the River Kwai, he has traded places with an officer during a battle scene – an act of impersonation that is profoundly interesting beyond its intense dramatic function. He sits in a corner of the lounge, orders an old-fashioned, and wouldn't be surprised if either Daisy Buchanan or the stiff-lipped British polymath played by Jack Hawkins should take the seat across from him.

What we didn’t know before Mad Men is that the existential hero existed not only in army jeeps on foreign soil or Montparnasse cafes but in suites of midtown Manhattan offices where, in some cases, as much intelligence went into the making of a TV commercial as into a song or a poem.

I’ll miss him, I’ll miss the show, and I’ll miss the chance to trade insights and observations with you, Amy. I can’t wait to read what you made of episode the last!

Love, your buddy in Madness,

David

Dear David,

Oh, the moment has come. I am sad the show's over, and a bit forlorn our collaboration has therefore run its course. I'm thankful Matt Weiner took the helm at the end and was solo writer/director for his last episode. That felt exactly right, and I think all in all, he acquitted himself excellently. His 7-year novel ended with momentous events/peak emotional moments in the lives of his characters, yet events that, as you observed, contain rich ambiguities. Decisive plot developments aplenty take place, which you enumerate, yet all story lines are left wide open, in great or small ways.

Anything could happen:

--to Peggy and Stan's new love relationship (and what of Stan's cute, redheaded, ultra cool, joint puffing, nude modeling nurse wife? was she kidnapped by aliens? accidentally vaporized by an experiment in nuclear medicine at the hospital where she was employed? did she run off with one of the doctors on M*A*S*H? )

--to the freshly, tenuously reunited Pete and Trudy (Trudy looking like Jackie O. with long hair, in her pink Chanel suit and hat in the last shot we see of her...)

--to Don, who has broken down completely, and then arisen into a kind of enlightenment, or at least a surcease of pain, to the tune of finger cymbals

--to Joan who has realized that she loves working, and any man who can't respect that can't really love her. (There is more than one kind of “coke” in this episode: Joan snorts cocaine for the first time and seems to really like it. oh, Joan, this is a slippery, snowy slope! will the white powder be passing fancy or dangerous obsession?)

--to Roger and Marie, who will torture each other, until it stops being fun

--to Betty, making her peace with a suddenly truncated life and trying to do her best by her children, in a way she never has before, attaining an almost holy focus and resolve

--to Sally, compelled now to grow up fast and become capable of adult tenderness. What will comprise Sally's inheritance? Betty’s beauty, skepticism and pragmatism? Don's candor, charm, flexibility, secretiveness, addiction to risk taking and imagination?

--Don and Betty, without ever saying so, forgive each other in an almost wordless long distance telephone conversation, where both are weeping silently, choking with grief, trying not to let the other person know how devastated they are

---Roger and Joan have an amazing interaction, intimate and open and real, almost giddy, in which Roger informs Joan he's leaving a good portion of his wealth to their son.

I'm not a big TV watcher. Never have been. (Not that I'm proud of being so outside the culture. I know it's shameful.) So the Mad Men devotion was a real aberration for me. I started watching it because of you, David. During the first season, when you told me how remarkable you felt it was, how sharp you thought the writing, and that there was a character reading Frank O'Hara's Lunch Poems in a bar (did I get that right?) I watched once out of curiosity and was hooked. So I'm not a television expert, but for me this show was as perfectly cast and exquisitely acted as anything I've ever seen in that medium.

Indelible Moments from this last installment:

1. The depiction of how awful encounter groups were in the 60s and 70s! Such a toxic mix of dime store psychology recklessly and blindly applied, mob dynamics, faux innocence, sexual desperation, mistaking cruelty for honesty, and encouraging dangerous levels of vulnerability in a situation that portrayed itself as safe and was actually anything but. I’m old enough and was sufficiently curious and naive to have participated in some of these nasty gatherings when a teen, and I must say Matt Weiner and co. captured it all perfectly: the crying, the hugging, the brain-frying silences, the predators posing as facilitators, the misplaced trust, the narcissism parading as self-exploration or team spirit, the perversity, the terror, the pretend empathy, the outrageousness, the inadvertent comedy. I squirmed watching those passages in the show, which were so spot on: when the hostile old lady shoves Don; when the depressed, nebbishy guy says, in trying to describe his agonizing feelings of alienation, “I had a dream I was on a shelf in the refrigerator,” which is at once pathetic and hilarious; when hippie-ish, necklace wearing, facilitators keep intoning, ad nauseum, in fake-serene voices “how did that make you feel?”

2. Sally and Bobby's conversation about their mother's impending death, containing just the right notes of age appropriateness, exigency and forced sudden maturity. At the end of the scene, Sally gives her younger brother a cooking lesson, because he's going to need to learn.

3. The phone conversation between Sally and Don in which Sally tells Don Betty is dying. How Sally takes charge, not with hostility, but pure urgency.

4. The phone conversation between Peggy and Don when Don calls from “Esalen.” I didn't love all the writing in this scene, but the acting was searing.

5. I loved that the last word of the show was “Om.” Beautiful. Perfect. And exactly what does Om mean? Like zillions of people, I have been repeating that round sound before and after yoga classes for years now, without ever inquiring into its meaning very deeply. The almighty, all knowing Wikipedia declares “Om,” in a lovely bit of slant rhyme, “a mystic syllable.”

Valerie Reiss, in the Huffpost blog, is a little more voluble and enlightening:

The sound appears to have first cropped up in the Upanishads, a collection of sacred texts that inform Hinduism. The Mandukya Upanishad, which is entirely devoted to om, begins like this: "Om is the imperishable word. Om is the universe, and this is the exposition of om. The past, the present, and the future, all that was, all that is, all that will be is om. Likewise, all else that may exist beyond the bounds of time, that too is om."

Good luck and Godspeed to all the brilliant actors who made Mad Men what it was. I look forward to seeing your future endeavors. All hail Matt Weiner, whose brainchild gave so many such pleasure, even an avowed anti-TV curmudgeon like yours truly. Can’t wait for his next project. Maybe he should consider a “dramedy” set in a creative writing department of an American University, possibly hiring a couple of poets as high paid consultants? David, does that sound good to you?

May 17, 2015

As we approach the end of the season, end of the series – game, set, and match -- I move that we keep in mind that a “terminal” is a noun as well as an adjective, a bus depot and therefore a place of origin as well as a destination and an end. It’s like the bus stop in the middle of no place where we see Don at episode’s end. You almost expect him to be ready to run across cornfield while a crop-duster attacks, like Cary Grant in North by Northwest, another handsome urban advertising man in a perfectly tailored suit.

Betty is, alas, terminal in the nasty sense of the word. There will be no new beginnings for her. Joan has lost her job and maybe her career in advertising. But Joan is nothing if not resourceful, and her talents, too good for the paleolithic types at McCann Erickson (ME for short), are such that she may re-launch herself spectacularly. But Betty is through. Lung cancer. Betty will die because of the product that Don’s firm used to service. And oddly enough, Betty – a tireless complainer and natural plaintiff – is OK with the dire forecast. Almost serene. Maybe it’s because of the Freud she’s been reading. Or maybe she is a belated convert to stoicism.

Pete is an apparent convert to Boy Scout ethics and he seems so boyishly earnest it looks like he’ll get the fabled American second-chance to make a go of it with Trudy. The pair and their toddler will uproot themselves to go where Pete’s new job takes them: Wichita, Kansas. The job comes with great perks – a company jet! – but still. For those of us who cannot forget the disgraceful, or conceited, or bullying, or malignant, or just clueless and gauche way he has behaved, Wichita may seem like punishment enough. The bars close early in Wichita, Pete, and they don’t measure up to the places you’re accustomed to, where you can close a deal over martinis and shrimp cocktails, moving your finger in a circle to signal to the tuxedo-clad waiter that it’s time for another round. “Wichita is beautiful – and wholesome.” Indeed. But this wholesome new life isn’t necessarily terminal. Would you bet on the marriage of Trudy and Pete in the heart of Kansas?

Henry, in denial over the death sentence Betty accepts, is not a convert to anything. He remains as sweetly loyal as a retriever and must have something going for him beyond his steadfast attachment to Betty, whom he sincerely worships. He remains an adviser on Rocky’s staff – that’s the governor of New York we’re talking about, and the most consequential man to hold the post in the last century. Henry has influence. He is not stupid. He can see right through Lindsay, who was able to walk through Harlem with his head held high and an amiable grin when other cities (Newark, Detroit) were hosting riots, because he, Lindsay, had had the foresight to bribe certain demagogues. Yet Henry has never had my sympathy, and I cringe a little when he is front and center. I think it’s because he is really so fundamentally different from Don, Sally, even Betty. I have read poems that lampoon Victor Lazlo (Paul Henreid in Casablanca) because he is too virtuous. I feel that way about Henry and am not terribly curious about which bus he will board at the terminal when he enters his widower years.

Who else hasn’t changed?

Duck (whose real name is Herman) is still drunk, still scheming, still making pie-in-the-sky deals.

Trudy is still vulnerable to sweet talk and the illusion that Dartmouth-educated (class of ’56) rich-boy Pete can change.

Don is still the enigmatic, self-assured stranger who can’t keep his eyes off a likely lady but whose natural state is that of the loner. He is in Kansas, the very state of Pete’s second chance, but life is anything but idyllic. In his motel room waiting for his car to be repaired, he is reading the novel everyone read that year, The Godfather, two years before the movie. With a bunch of vets who drink too much and are as mean drunk as they appear friendly sober, Don makes the astonishing admission that he killed his C.O. (commanding officer) in Korea. That is not what happened. He may be guilty of impersonating an officer and, well, identity theft. But the real Don Draper died in the same enemy explosion that Dick Whitman survived. Does self-aggrandizement or guilt or some combination of the two stand behind Don’s lie? The Vets turn ugly, resentful, which seems to be middle America’s response to “Don Draper” in his custom-tailored Madison Avenue suit. Don is still as vulnerable to a sucker punch as he was when he was cruising his Ossining neighborhood in search of Suzanne Farrell – remember her? the idealistic teacher with the same name as the great Ballenchine ballerina -- and picked up a couple of hitchhikers who got him stoned unconscious in a motel room and stolen his cash.

Somebody did steal the cash that the Vets had raised – a theft that cost the wrongly accused Don dearly. Don apprehends the thief and makes him fess up. But he doesn’t take revenge, despite the beating he has endured. On the contrary: Don gives his car to the con artist. Could it be he recognizes something of himself in the younger man? I don’t think he is renouncing property and material values in line with the thirst for radical social change then becoming fashionable. Don never was and never will be an ideologue. If he knows anything it’s that he known nothing for sure. Aside from daughter Sally, whom he faithfully phones, he maintains his distance from everyone, keeps his options open. He is the embodiment of the great male invention of that period, to whom so many names and so much study were given. Dangling man. Irrational man. L’etranger. Alienated man, without direction or affiliation. The anti-type of the organization man, in rebellion against the codes of the one-dimensional man. He’s the guy at the bus depot who would buy a ticket to anywhere – or would if he had no car.

But Don is still behind the wheel, still the figure in his own dream who is pulled over by a state trooper.

“What were you doing?” The cop asks.

“Driving,” Don says.

The cop is unamused. “You knew we’d catch up with you eventually.”

Don’s rejoinder (“driving”) is not just a wisecrack. Driving is like drifting -- albeit with an apparent purpose. And “driving” is as good a word as any for what most of us are doing at any given time in our lives.

That’s my take as we prepare for the finale this coming Sunday.

Love,

David

Dear David,

One of the closing observations in your blog text this week is “Driving is like drifting...” Exactly so. Don has been on the road for weeks now, without a clear destination, propelled into some kind of pilgrimage of self-reinvention. This episode's title “The Milk and Honey Route” is apparently a phrase from hobo slang, dating perhaps from the teens, 1920s and ‘30s. According to the internet, “Often hobos speak of a railroad as a ‘milk and honey route’. . . Any railroad running through a valley of plenty may be called a milk and honey line.” Specifically, the phrase appears in writing by and about a guy named Nels Anderson (aka Dean Stiff, what a great nom de drift) who lived the “bummery” life for years before reinventing himself and attending the University of Chicago. He published a study of hobos, tramps, migratory workers, etc., based on his first-hand experience, entitled “The Hobo: The Sociology of the Homeless Man.” Hexagram 56 in the I Ching is called “The Wanderer.” The text says in part, “A wanderer has no fixed abode; his home is the road. Therefore he must take care to remain upright and steadfast, so that he sojourns only [in] the proper places, associating with good people. Then he has good fortune and can go his way unmolested.” I will try to beam this fine ancient advice to Don Draper, via time travel ESP, though I know, whatever his fate, it is already sealed, and will be broadcast, for good or ill, tomorrow night. He's not sitting at the deserted rural bus stop in the middle of nowheresville, grinning, any longer.

Lots of people are of course speculating about what the last episode will contain, what the final scenes will be, which characters we will get to glimpse again, what music will play under the last shot, sending us off into a Mad Men-bereft world. Will we see Betty’s funeral? Will Peggy be reunited with the child she gave away? Will more Sterling Cooper employees who were sucked up into the typhoon of the McCann Erikson merger extricate themselves? I was moved by Betty's instructions-to-be-read-after-my-death. Penned on blue monogrammed stationary, she handed them to Sally in the middle of night, slipping into Sally's room with her characteristic mix of grace and brusqueness, asking “Are you awake?” Of course Sally, who'd been told out of the blue that morning that her mother was ill and going to die, was wide awake. Electrified. Of course Sally doesn't wait, but opens the envelope almost immediately. Most of what Betty wrote had to do with how she wished to be buried, in what dress, with what hairdo, even including a color snapshot to indicate the gown and coiff. Exactly in character. Gorgeous Betty, always so perfectly dressed and made up, always so careful about her appearance, with a wide streak of complicated narcissism. She manages a lovely morsel of motherly wisdom for Sally, telling her at the end of the letter that while she'd always had a hard time with Sally’s fiery independence, she’d lately come to realize that it was a good thing. Betty sends her daughter off into her future with this blessing, “I know your life will be an adventure.” I loved Sally’s reaction to being told by Henry during his visit to her boarding school dorm room that her mother was dying. Her face crumpled and she covered her ears. I loved that Henry gave her permission to cry, and immediately began to weep himself, while Sally remained dry-eyed, her hand hovering for a moment above her stepfather’s slumped back, before she could bring herself to touch, to comfort him.

Other tiny details that stirred me this episode: Pete fingerpainting toothpaste on his little daughter Tammy’s knee as the go-to home remedy for her bee sting. The fucking doctor refusing to give Betty her diagosis, insisting on having her phone Henry so the diagnosis could be given to her husband. As though she were a child or a moron. As you note, David, Betty seems to make her peace with this stunning blow fairly quickly. Henry is panicking, wrecked, heartbroken, of course. I liked Don watching Red Foxx and Flip Wilson on the grainy TV in his crummy hotel room just before the TV went on the fritz. I cannot say that I enjoyed hearing the snippet of Merle Haggard's infamous Okie from Muskogee on Don's car radio, possibly one of the most hideous songs ever penned, but it was deeply appropriate in terms of plot and context. I just learned Haggard wrote it when he was newly out of prison! He said, of the inspiration for writing the song:

“When I was in prison, I knew what it was like to have freedom taken away. Freedom is everything. During Vietnam, there were all kinds of protests. Here were these [servicemen] going over there and dying for a cause — we don’t even know what it was really all about. And here are these young kids, that were free, b—-ing about it. There’s something wrong with that and with [disparaging] those poor guys. We were in a wonderful time in America and music was in a wonderful place. America was at its peak and what the hell did these kids have to complain about? These soldiers were giving up their freedom and lives to make sure others could stay free. I wrote the song to support those soldiers.” So it’s perfect for Don to hear, when he is sprung (whether temporarily or permanently, we don’t yet know) from his former job and life, and hits the road, seeking the holy grail of himself.

A spatula-wielding Betty pulling cookies out of the oven just as Sally arrives home (after having been enlisted by Henry to try to talk her mother into getting treatment) was a nice touch. Pete’s man-to-man chat with his brother at the fancy restaurant about infidelity, opportunity, risk-taking, what wives do and don't know was interesting. Vincent Kartheiser rocks. Betty's strength and quiet dignity when Henry confronts her the morning after her diagnosis, as she’s setting off for school, moved me. “Why are you doing this?” he asks incredulously (or some such expostulation.) He is amazed she’s toting her books, ready to attend class as though nothing has happened. “Why was I ever doing it?” She asks softly, continuing on her way. She seems both matter of fact and wistful, resigned and determined. I take her remark to mean that she was always just going back to school for herself, it was something she'd personally longed for, an end in itself. Maybe she felt a little foolish doing it initially. Maybe when she learned she likely had a few months to live at most, she felt even more sheepish. And yet...what else is she supposed to do? Her plan seems to be to maintain a facade of normalcy for her two younger children for as long as that's possible. Is this a good plan? Unfair? Is she perpetuating a falsehood that will ultimately rob her two small sons of the opportunity to say goodbye? These are unanswerable questions. That's all for me this week.

May 10, 2015

I can’t resist opening with Jenny Factor, who met “Mad Men” show-runner Matt Weiner at a Harvard symposium last week. Jenny was armed with a planted question: “Given that Don's real name is Whitman, and that Michael Ginsberg has the same name as Allen, was Matt thinking of Harold Hart Crane when giving a name to media maven Harry Crane?” Matt shook his head no; he wasn’t thinking of poets’ names. He said, “Whitman was quite simply “White Man.” He added: “Don’s fundamental questions are ‘Is this it?’ and ‘What’s wrong with me?’”

Meanwhile, Don Draper’s latest love hails from Racine, Wisconsin – Racine (French for “root”) being the name of one of France’s most honored dramatists. But no doubt this is entirely a coincidence.

To this observer, the abhorrent treatment of Joan at the hands of the McCann Ericson creeps was the dominant note in episode #5. First there’s Dennis, who fails to read the briefs Joan has prepared, interrupts her phone conversation with her client, and offends him, the Atlanta-based Avon man confined to a wheelchair, by suggesting that they play a few rounds of golf at Augusta. Dennis has ruined the telephonic encounter —and then he has the gall to be testy when Joan calls him on it.

So Joan brings her problem to Ferg Donnelly. Bad choice. Ferg is only too happy to get Dennis off the case, but he nominated himself instead and leeringly proposes that the and Joan fly to Atlanta together – to apologize to Avon but also to have a good time and get to know each other better. He doesn’t have to spell it out, the fucker; Joan knows exactly what he means, but is disinclined to play the fuckee.

So now she goes to Jim Hobart, the head of McCann, who cannot be said to be sympathetic and whose most memorable line, in the context of McCann’s clout, is that the New York Times would print Mein Kampf on its front page if McCann ordered it – an interesting figure of speech not only because of what it says about McCann (Hitler Lite!) but because of what it says about the venerable newspaper of record (“comme ils sont putains”). Jim makes it clear that Joan’s accounts are too small for him to care about; that if she expects to succeed at McCann, she had better learn to play ball; and that he’d be happy to be rid of her, and her half a million dollar contract, on a fifty-cent a dollar buyout.

However repugnant, it’s deal she will have to take, although there’s a part of her that would like to fight it out in a court of law, perhaps with a class action lawsuit.

The diaspora of Sterling Cooper personnel is at hand. Goodbye, Joan. Goodbye, Shirley, the second African-American secretary to be employed at Sterling Cooper, who is taking a job in insurance and thanks Roger for being so “amusing.” Of the old standbys, the two who might fit right in at McCann are a beaming Pete (a vice–president) and self-congratulating Harry. Stan is making the transition, but what are his options? Ted -- who now projects defeat and resignation, in stark contrast to the go-get-‘em young man who used to compete so fiercely with Don -- may be able to see the silver lining. At McCann he may be able to relax. Or so he thinks. But the futures of Peggy and Roger and Don are unresolved.

Peggy and Roger are the two of our regulars who are arguably the most deeply affected by the turbulent 60s. The idea of Roger at the player piano (“Hi-Lily, Ho Lo”) while Peggy glides on roller skates in a deserted office with a half-empty bottle of sweet vermouth on the desk makes for a delightfully surreal scene that no one would have imagined back in 1960 or ’62. Things are flying apart; the center cannot hold! It is even more surreal than the sight of Betty reading a Collier paperback edition of Freud’s writings.

And Don, god bless him, pulls an unexpected – and, dare I say it, existential -- stunt in line with going to French movies on company time, reading Frank O’Hara, imprisoning his mistress in a Sherry Netherland hotel suite, etc. At a meeting for a new “diet beer,” a “low-calorie beer” – what we would come to know as Lite Beer from Miller (which occasioned the “Tastes great” versus “Less filling” TV ad campaign of note) – Don looks out the window, sees the Empire State Building, hears a few sentence of the market research about Milwaukee, and decides to check out. We next see him driving west, thinking of Kerouac’s On the Road, listening to the car radio in downtown Cleveland (“Sealed with a Kiss”), and having a conversation with the ghost of Bert Cooper. Longtime admirer of Robert Morse that I am, I welcome his apparition and his wisdom. “You like to play the stranger,” he tells Don – the stranger in the conventional sense and in that favored by Camus (“L’Etranger” the novel) and Baudelaire (“L’Etranger” the prose poem a century before Camus).

I confess to maximum puzzlement over Don’s obsession with Diana, the waitress from Racine, Wisconsin, who ditched him and disappeared. Her ex-husband calls her “a tornado,” who had left “a trail of broken bodies” behind her. I don’t see it. But she is at least a pretext for his driving off into the westward night, and when he picks up a scraggly hitchhiker n his way to St. Paul, that is where Don heads, though it is in the opposite direction from Mad Ave.

What do you make of these developments – and, come to think of it, of Meredith, Don’s secretary, who, having been an army brat, has hidden talents (for interior design), defends the absent Don with a beautiful hilarious ingenuousness when confronted by an exasperated Jim Hobart, and still gets written off as a “moron”?

D.

Dear David,

I'm glad you brought up Meredith, Don's sunny dispositioned secretary, who likes to dress in buttercup colors. Perky, efficient Meredith, with the voice of a kindergarten teacher, is running Don's life now, it seems, at least organizationally: which includes decorating his new apartment for him. While Don is simply running away. AWOL and headed vaguely west. Is Meredith on a trajectory out of the advertising business (too?) Ready to jump ship so she doesn't have to endure the work environment at the misogynist, high stakes torture machine known as McCann Erickson? If there's a villain in this show, it's McCann Erickson. Is there a soul working there who doesn't have the ethics of piranha? Will Meredith reinvent herself as a zany, eccentric Manhattan interior decorator, wearing crazy paisley pant suits, elephant bell bottoms, mod print dresses and knee high lace up boots? She jokes with Don about his having to brave "the hardships of the Plaza" (hotel) while he waits for his new digs to be ready. But will he ever actually live in this apartment now that he's hit the road with no apparent destination? Has he become the proverbial wanderer, albeit one who makes Cary Grant look scruffy and is traveling not in some funky, breakdown prone jalopy but an expensive, elegant set of wheels? Any bets? I wondered briefly if the title of this episode, "Lost Horizon," referencing the utopian novel by James Hilton and movie based upon it, could be a hint that Don will end up renouncing the world and becoming a dropout /devotee of some sort...1970s style. Maybe he'll end up at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, or at its satellite location in San Francisco (which didn't last.) He could hang out with Alan Watts, Carl Rogers, Timothy Leary, BF Skinner. I can see him holding his own with that crowd of cutting edge thinkers, philosophers, life style experimenters, psychologists; Advertising is pure projective psychology, isn't it? And though he looks like a poster dude for "straight square man/establishment guy" he is anything but. What do you think of Don as groovy, 1970s itinerant monk? At least until the wandering bug bites him again and he performs another self-reinvention. Will he become some version of the hitchhiking uber hippie he picks up at the end of the show? How would he look with super long hair? Oh, Photoshop, you must help me envision Don with hair down to his shoulders, arrayed in talismanic necklaces.

I love the Hokusai print that Peggy "inherits" from Bert Cooper, via Roger, as the old office is emptied and possessions are boxed up or thrown away, and Roger unearths it from a closet. My brilliant friend Brian Tucker knew the title of the print: (though it seems to have several names, actually, just like Don Draper himself) "The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife." This piece of Japanese erotic art, which Peggy initially recoils from when Roger urges it on her as a gift, is eventually accepted. It travels with her to her new office, when the goons at McCann Erickson finally figure out that she's not a secretary and rustle her up an office. The shot of Peggy sauntering at last into McCann Erickson, walking sassily down the corridor with some of her office belongings, ready to move in, drunk on Vermouth (that being the only imbibe-able left in the cleaned out Sterling Cooper offices in the previous scene with Roger), dark glasses having just slightly slipped down her nose, cigarette dangling louche/sexy from her mouth, octopus-sex print tucked under her arm, is delightful. That femme bravado will last, how long do you think, David? Maybe 6 minutes at most at McCann Erickson? Hokusai lived from 1760-1849, the ever-wise Internet tells me. The print depicts, as Roger neatly puts it "an octopus pleasuring a woman." It prefigures a category of porn erotica in Japan that's currently classified as "tentacle sex" or "tentacle erotica." I leave it up to your imagination what that entails. (I learned the term "tentacle sex" a few weeks ago, listening to a radio show on the erotic manga industry in Japan.) Actually, Roger probably hasn't had time to properly study the print, or he would have said "two octopi pleasuring a woman." The print features not only a huge octopus paying attention to a certain part of the woman's anatomy, but also a much smaller octopus lurking up by her head, (one text I skimmed on the subject said this little guy was the larger octopus' son!!??*&%$!) tentacle tip neatly wrapped around her nipple.

A little hard to watch Joan get pushed around and treated like trash by every man she tries to work with in good faith, going up and up the ladder of command, trying to get a modicum of respect or redress from SOMEONE in charge. When she finally arrives at the top of the sleaze ball food chain with her simple request to be treated like a human being and allowed to do her work properly, she has the dignified, controlled fury of a wounded warrior queen in her stand-off with the evil Jim Hobart in his office. She is an AMAZON! In getting her to accept a 50 cents on the dollar buyout and leave the bubbling cauldron of oppression that is McCann Erickson, is Roger, her old flame, a savior or a betrayer?

Speaking of old flames, there's a tender scene between Don and Betty, I liked, when he comes to pick up the already departed Sally. Betty is reading Freud's AnAnalysis of a Case of Hysteria, a bit nervous about being back in school. Her figure is a bit softer, more matronly now. They tease each other a little about getting older. A sort of easy, nostalgic, wistful intimacy filled the room like a mist, a feeling I'd not seen between them. I can't remember a scene between the two when one of them wasn't angry or desperate or humiliated. So are we to get the message Don has made his peace with Betty? She has a new family, a new direction, stability, and seems content. Sally "found a ride" to wherever Don was supposed to drive her. So she doesn't seem to need him anymore, either. And we fans (sniff! sob!) are going to have to learn to do without him too, soon enough.

I am so sad that Mad Men is ending!!! Guess I'll have to drown my sorrow in a Lite beer. (McCann Erikson creep "When we talk about a low calorie beer, we become feminine.") I didn't know that low calorie beer was full of estrogen, but now I do!

May 02, 2015

He was due. After humiliations at the hands of his father-in-law, a Metro North railway conductor, the late Lane Pryce, Detroit auto executives, irate husbands, and wounded wives, his own among them, Pete surprises the viewer by standing up for Trudy’s honor when their daughter is denied admission to the posh Greenwich Country Day School. For once Pete, who routinely takes it on the chin, literally or not, is the successful aggressor, landing a “sucker punch” on the jaw of the school’s admissions officer, and we applaud. Trudy is, well, impressed, as if to say there was a reason she married him.

It turns out that the decision to deny the Campbells’ daughter has to do with a centuries-old Scottish feud between the MacDonalds and the Campbells. It is one of the curious ethnic jokes to surface in recent episodes – like Ken Cosgrove’s statement, when he is fired by McCann Ericson, that he wouldn’t have fit in there because he is “not Catholic, not Irish, and [he] can read”

McCann makes everyone see red, now more than ever as our Sterling Cooper heroes and heroines learn that their lease has been canceled and they will be moved from the Time-Life Building on Sixth Avenue to McCann headquarters. Don has a plan, which he develops when Lew Avery phones from California to say he is joining the Tokyo firm that wants his adolescent cartoon strip. But when the partners convene with Jim Hobart of McCann and Don goes into his pitch for retaining his agency’s autonomy by moving its offices to Los Angeles, Hobart cuts him short. Don has failed to save the day. The line of the week is said by Don later that same day, over drinks with Roger at the generic bar the two gents favor. Don is acknowledging that he is in the wrong on the subject under discussion. “For the second time today I surrender,” he says.

Speaking of Lew Avery, the creep fires off one parting shot at Don: “Sayonara. Enjoy the rest of your miserable life.” A friend of mine who worked in a Mad Ave ad agency in the 1970s tells me that the most realistic character in the show – that is, the one most like the people he used to work with – is Lew Avery.

But I’d rather speak of Don. . . who is alone more often than not. . .whose latest girlfriend sneaks out and leaves town with no forwarding address. . .who may soon (as Meredith reminds him) be without either an office or an apartment. . . and who nevertheless remains the Don Juan de nos jours,though with unexpected twists that will make me want to bring him up the next time I get the chance to teach Byron’s “Don Juan.”

The last scene in this week’s episode has Don and Roger trying to rally the troops. It’s a scene we’ve seen before when the agency is under threat. A gambit is announced to the staff, and Don manages to make the event inspirational. Only here, in the mood of surrender, it doesn’t work. The speeches are not even listened to as staff members talk and scatter.

I am pretty certain that Acker Bilk’s “Stanger on the Shore” has been heard on a previous episode – probably one set in 1962, the year the song was a big radio hit with delicious clarinet solos and sweet sentimental strings. The song is reprised in the scene in which Peggy and Stan have at each other and Peggy ends up confessing about her child out of wedlock. It’s a great choice, and who can complain about Dean Martin singing the exit music over the credits? In the song, money burns a hole in “my” pocket, and I wish I had a million dollars to buy pretty presents for “you.” Nice to hear it; the mood is like that of the early 60s – very different from the prevailing mood of surrender in 1970.

Let me leave you with a question. There was a time when Ted and Don seemed to reflect each other, but that hasn’t been true since Ted left for California and began to sulk. Now we learn via the exposition-by-dialogue method that he and his wife are divorced. He left New York to save his marriage and leave behind temptation in the form of Peggy. Now that he is back in the city, he has a new girlfriend: a woman he dated in college. What happened to the torch he had carried for Peggy? Stacey has a feeling that Joan will clear out of the agency and join Richard as his spouse. What thinkest thou?

Love, David

Dear David,

Right you are about its being Pete’s episode to shine! Well-known as a selfish, ruthless, sneaky, entitled little prick, Pete emerges from this episode wearing a halo, albeit a cockeyed one, earned by doing noble deeds, but not quite by the book. As you note, he gives the rude official at the fancy school he and his ex are trying to get their kid admitted to a well-deserved punch in the schnozzle. The guy got nasty about their child, Tammy (who I'd like to see appear on the show before its swan song.) Kudos to the Mad Men scriptwriters for poking fun at the ridiculous “Draw a Person Test” (called the “Draw a Man Test” in this episode) a highly questionable but still used psychological “test” of personality and intelligence. Initially, the admissions official cites Tammy's poor, rudimentary drawings for this test as a decisive factor in her being denied a place in the school. After dismissing Trudy’s polite pleas for reconsideration coldly, almost viciously, the official admits the little girl was actually denied admission based on her last name! (“No MacDonald will ever mix with a Campbell!”) Pete's reactive, righteous pugilism elicits a moment of starry-eyed admiration from ex wife Trudy. (Trudy’s a character I am always hungry to see, especially now that she appears so infrequently post divorce.) “No MacDonald will ever mix with a Campbell!” I laughed at the reference to an ancient MacDonald/ Campbell clan feud, which seemed archaic and absurd, as though the 1970s combatants in the day-school office should be clad in kilts and smeared with war paint, broadswords on hips, in the style of the movie Braveheart. And yet. One of the many strengths of Mad Men’s writers has been their consistent willingness to deal with racism, head on, and slantwise, and even via humor. Watching the episode made me remember a story my grandfather told me eons ago. He’d tried to check into a hotel in Florida with my grandmother when they were newlyweds, around 1930. His last name sounded Jewish, he was told at the front desk, and the hotel “didn't take Jews.” The couple was turned away, despite there being many available rooms. At that memory, I stopped laughing.

Pete’s second act of heroism in episode four is to leak to Peggy the major plot development of the day, though he has been threateningly sworn to secrecy. This news, as you note, rocked the worlds of all characters associated with Sterling Cooper. S.C. is being merged into voracious adoptive parent company McCann Erikson. Upstart S.C. will have to give up their building, autonomy, and name, and move in with that hated, larger, more heartless entity in an abhorrent forced marriage. There is general mourning, even panic, when the whole office hears the news, as you say.

I was fascinated by the euphemisms for Sterling Cooper's move into McCann Erickson:

We're being absorbed!

We're being swallowed!

They finally got you: they ate you up! Like a child's bad dream of being eaten by monsters.

I loved the scene in which Peggy and Stan are supervising market research on children playing with Play Doh. Or are they casting kids for a commercial? Peggy is awkward with the kindergarten-aged tykes. She seems near terrified, at an utter loss. “Just play!” she waves her arms and commands them as they sit at a child sized conference table. “Do what you'd do if we weren't here.” Of course the children freeze. Stan has to step in. “Real kids are shy, you have to talk to them like people,” he gently chides her. He breaks the ice by heaving some Play Doh at the wall, much to the children's surprise and delight. Later, in a private moment, Stan expresses surprise at Peggy’s fear reaction at the horde of youngsters. She as much as admits to him, obliquely, that she had a child out of wedlock when she was younger. He seems sympathetic, takes this in, looks as though he may revise his thinking about her a little.

Peggy, like the rest of her colleagues, is appalled by the prospect of becoming a cog in the McCann Erikson mega-machine and explores her options with a corporate headhunter. As a female, having tasted McCann Erickson's attitude towards women, she may also fear being harassed and demoted. “Who wants me?” she asks him, smiling nervously as they sit down to talk. (That chirpy quote is pure Peggy, a shaken AND over-stirred cocktail of anxiety, drive, sorrow and fierce hope.) He replies that her best bet is to go with McCann Erikson, the behemoth market dominator at the moment. Just what she did not want to hear. She looks sick with disappointment and dread.

Tiny bibulous footnote:

In the scene that opens the show, Pete obsequiously says to Ken “Look, we got some of your favorite wine.” The wine that Pete (with Don's help) unsuccessfully employs to woo Ken's business at the top of the hour, now that Ken is in charge of advertising for Dow chemical, is a vintage Ken declared he loved in a previous installment: Chateau Margaux ‘53. Pete looks completely dashed when Ken crushes his hopes for landing the account almost immediately. Don, always sensible in such circumstances, applies himself to drinking the primo vino. Chateau Margaux ‘53 is a real vintage, selling online today, described as “supple and fragrant,” and as possessing a “distinctly perfumed aroma, refined elegance and tremendous power.” Price (in 1970)? $600 to $2,000 a bottle. David, what would that be at today’s prices?

We get such nice little glimpses of old intimacies in this episode: Trudy and Pete’s aforementioned momentary rapprochement, after long bitterness. “You should ice that hand,” she tells him, almost tenderly, after he’s socked the admissions officer. She lets down her guard a little, complains about being a vulnerable divorcee, about getting older. Pete seems to tear up, a glimmer of his old love for her almost visible, sighing admiringly, “You're ageless!” Joan rests her head on Roger’s shoulder when she gets the bad news about Sterling Cooper being swallowed by McCann Erikson as Jonah by the whale, recalling to mind their old passion. Don learns that the waitress he fell for, Diana Bauer, who pushed him away and disappeared, has been calling his answering service, though instructing the operators not to tell him she’d phoned. Roger’s intermittent old flame, Marie Calvert, comes up in conversation, though she doesn't appear. Roger proposes a toast to the dear departed comrade and founder Bert Cooper as the gang sits in a bar, shell-shocked about the merger, trying to “absorb” the reality of what’s to come.

Wonderful question about Ted's lack of interest in Peggy now that he's actually divorced and theoretically free. What happened to their yen for each other? He's taken up with a woman he knew in college, professes to be happy now. Could this account for some of Peggy's brittleness around the office? The affair with Peggy may have been what Ted needed to propel him out of an ailing marriage, more than it was true love on his part. And I’m not sure the sharp- edged, intensely ambitious, uptight current version of Peggy would be a great long-term match for the laid-back Ted. I’m also not persuaded that Peggy, with her keen visual sense, would be able to tolerate that buffoonish mustache. I’m still hoping the ex-lawyer brother-in-law of the fired Mathis will return and sweep Peggy off her feet. But who knows what the Mad Men writers have in store for us? Till next week!

April 25, 2015

In a show as well-written as "Mad Men," there is always some competition for the best line of the week. Here are my choices.

#1: "When I watch television, the commercials are my favorite part." This is said by Sarah, 17, one of Sally's friends, flirting with Don, who later (defensively) says she is "fast." Don is treating the girls to a restaurant dinner before they take off on a "twelve states in twelve days" bus tour. One reason I like the line is its ironic self-consciousness, which makes me take a second look at the commercials punctuating this week's episode. And I have to say that among all the spots for cars, credit cards, bad new movies,prescription drugs and their side effects, snack foods (Doritos), cable TV's indisputably evil empire (Time Warner), and "4G LTE signal" gadgets, the only commercial that holds my attention is that for the new Apple watch. I have no intention of buying one, mind you, being quite satisfied with the Omega on my wrist, but it is arresting -- unlike the mediocre stuff that keeps interrupting a show that is, after all, an elegy for Madison Avenue and the advertising campaigns of yore.

#2: "I'm a little nearsighted; I'm not blind." Said by Richard, a man in search of an optometrist who lucks into meeting Joan instead and has the wit to keep the conversation going and to land a dinner date with our favorite red-head. Is he good enough for her? We'll see.

#3 "This is supposed to be about my job, not the meaning of life." Said by Peggy to Don during an employee-review session. If there is a line that sums her up, or at least defines her characteristic position among the shenanigan-prone characters at Sterling Cooper, for better or worse this is it.

#4) "This conversation is a little late. . .and so am I." Said by Sally to her mother, showing a ready and somewhat cruel wit. Rebuffing the attempt at mom-daughter candor, she is really saying: I can out-bitch you, Betty.

#5) "You don't have any character. You're just handsome." Said by John Mathis, who is about to be fired, to Don. The line reminds me of an anecdote about handsome Robert Taylor, who plays Ivanhoe, among other movie heroes, and was married to Barbara Stanwyck for twelve years. To critics who complain that he is a wooden actor, the correct response begins, "If you look like Robert Taylor. . ."

#6) "This place reeks of failure. It's an $85,000 fixer-upper." Said by the real-estate agent, Melody by name, who is trying to sell the Upper East Side penthouse apartment Don and Megan had shared. The lines are informative -- that price in 1970 would have to be multiplied by at least thirty in today's market -- and it is one of those thesis sentences ("reeks of failure") that leaps out at you. Yet Melody, surprising herself, sells the apartment after all, and there you have Don: managing to move forward despite the occasional stink of failure, still true to his idea of what masculinity looks like even when others around him let their facial hair get in the way or buy their clothes somewhere cheap instead of Paul Stuart.

I teach on West 12th Street so it's nice to know that that's where Joan lives. But tell me why does she tell Richard she's been "divorced twice"? Other questions for you: How do you like Glenn Bishop now that he has had the growth spurt that I can say from experience is one of the glories of being a high school senior? Given characters named Whitman, Crane, and Ginsberg, is it significant that Glenn's last name is that of a famous poet? (Was this new info? I remember Glenn's mother, who worked for JFK in 1960, but not her last name.) Finally, as a writer, don't you relish the fact that Roger, asked to produce a 2,500-word speech on a tight deadline, would delegate the task?

Love,

David

Hombres Locos [April 25, 2015]

Dear David,

I love your “best lines of the week” conceit for this week’s blog post.

This was my favorite episode of the (SOB!!!) final season so far, due in large part to generous helpings of Sally, Peggy, Joan, and Betty, all my favorite Mad Men femmes. With at least 3 of them involved in sex-related situations or conversations during the episode, life couldn't be better!

(GIANT ASIDE: Speaking of commercials-as-punishment, which you brought up in your opening paragraph: I sometimes end up re-watching Mad Men episodes on the computer. And while grateful that AMC makes them available this way for further study, the strategy for delivering commercials during these online viewings is heinous. Quartets of commercials abruptly interrupt the show, often at key moments (nothing new there). But unlike watching network TV as you described, where you usually get an array of different commercials each break, online you see the same one or two commercials EACH DAMN TIME. During some of the frequent commercial barrages, you see the same single commercial four times back to back. (I turn the sound off so at least I don't have to hear them.) Highly obnoxious. When this indignity occurs, I console myself by leaving the room, to pet dogs, secure snacks, pee, or take a close look at my eyebrows in the bathroom mirror (always edifying, I find. You can tell your future by scrutinizing your eyebrows.) And I keep a list of the products that are advertised in this mind-battering, abusive way, so I will remember NEVER to buy ANY of them. I feel Don Draper would rather be celibate for life than ever allow ads for any product Sterling Cooper represented, be it peanut butter cookies or pantyhose, to bludgeon a poor, lowly computer user in this abusive way. END OF CRANKY ASIDE.)

I love two pairings or doublings in this episode. ONE: we get to see both Joan and Don woken up as the show opens. Don's overslept and his realtor lets herself in to show his on-the-market house, and thus wakes him. On the opposite coast, Joan, on a business trip, is awakened in her hotel room by her annoying mother, who's babysitting her little boy back in New York, calling too early because she just can't keep it straight about the time difference. We get the fun of hearing what Joan orders for breakfast from room service, which is a perfect character description of Joan via food: “A glass of skim milk, a grapefruit, a pot of coffee..............(significant PAUSE) ..........and some French toast.”

The second pairing is a kind of image/dialogue rhyme. When Joan is having sex with Richard for the first time, there's a little jokey pillow talk about how avid he is. He teases, “I just got out of jail.” She smiles and sweetly replies, “And you're acting like it.” When Sally and Betty are dealing with travelers checks for Sally's impending school trip, Betty lamely tries to extract a promise from Sally that she won't launch into teen nymphomaniac mode on the trip: “There are going to be boys everywhere. So I hope you won't act like you were just let out of a cage.” This is an interesting remark on a number of levels, but the image of surging sexual appetite being analogous to being freed from a cage or jail is arresting (ha ha).

The mother/daughter scene with Sally and Betty was excellent. It made me realize that, in many ways, Sally is more sophisticated than Betty. Maybe this is true of most mothers and daughters, once the daughters reach young womanhood? Betty seemed suddenly hopelessly old-fashioned and out of touch trying primly to warn Sally about “boys.” As you noted, Sally used the opportunity to land a verbal sucker punch.

This episode contains one of Betty’s finest hours, in my view. She is often the beautiful woman fans love to hate, but in this episode, dealing with the distraught Glenn Bishop who's about to ship off to Vietnam, she actually treats him tenderly, with a mixture of maternal and sexual wisdom we rarely see from her. She is kind to him, and rebuffs his awkward advance (I thought) with real gentleness and concern, her vaunted haughtiness and narcissism nowhere in sight. She knows what he needs to hear at this crucial moment. “You're going to make it, I'm positive!” There has always been chemistry between Betty and this kid, ever since he was a small boy. (I also applaud Mad Men's writers, for being brave enough in early episodes to allow their story line to deal with the sexuality of children, and I admire the way they have pursued that plot thread now in this final season, rather than dropping it, though it is a hot potato topic.) It's been so amazing to watch Glenn and Sally grow up and come of age on this show!

I loved Don and Sally’s terse interchange as she was boarding the school trip bus. She may at times seem more sophisticated than Betty, but her relation to Don is a different story, and of course they are very alike. He's able to take on the chin her rather vicious adolescent attack on his parenting, and his reply is to tell her that while she's beautiful, she could be so much more. For all his Don Juan antics, he takes women seriously, and in some cases tries to get them to take themselves seriously as well.

There's online scuttlebutt about Joan's two divorces...claiming she was married to someone named Scottie prior to her tying the knot with the inept Army surgeon, but I'll have to do further research. Glenn has performed that miracle that adolescents do, turned from a lumpy, funny kid to a wonderful creature, a tall, good looking young man (yuk hairdo, facial hair scraggles and sideburns of the period notwithstanding.)

Since you were speculating, David, about what the closing scenes of Mad Men will be, I wonder if the show's last moments are going somehow to involve Don’s so-called “Gettysburg Address,” the speech about the company's vision and future direction that Roger has sloughed off onto our favorite Lothario? What thinkest thou?

April 18, 2015

Others have probably observed that Don Draper’s “born again” moment – the moment when he took on the identity of a deceased officer in a Korean War battle – is an identical repetition of what shirtless Bill Holden has done in the POW camp in The Bridge on the River Kwai. But though poor Bill comes to an unhappy end in that remarkable movie, it is not what I foresee for Don when Mad Men reaches April 1970, Nixon moves against Cambodia, and four Kent State students die at the hands of the National Guard. Unlike the literalists who believe that the falling-man motif in the opening credits must control what happens at the very end, I feel that the aptest concluding sequence would have Don alone at the bar of a cocktail lounge, approached by a woman (or that woman’s friend) – with the implication that nothing is terminal. . . that Don will continue to be Don, a true Don though not in the Corleone sense. . . and that “some things that happen for the first time / [will] seem to be happening again. . .”

Don’t go all moral on us, Matt Weiner. We did not identify ourselves with Don Draper because we disapprove of him (though we may well disapprove of a lot of the things he does).

It surprises me that Megan is so bitter. And that her mother would clean out Don of his furniture. And that Don, headstrong though he is, would go all-in on Diana, the waitress from Racine, Wisconsin.

It doesn't surprise me that, thanks to Marie Calvait, Don's apartment is devoid of furniture, and he stands in it, disconcerted, surrounded by emptiness.

It doesn’t surprise me that media maven Harry Crane should so sleazily and brazenly hit on Megan when lunching with her ostensibly to discuss her agent and her career . . .although I am surprised that Harry, whose fashion taste has always been erratic at best, is wearing a nice suit and tie when entering Don’s office. Don’s navy suit and tie are, to be sure, three times nicer.

It doesn’t surprise me, but it disappoints me, that Harry covers his ass so shamelessly in Don’s office, telling him that Megan is “unstable” and will say “crazy things.”

It surprises me that Don writes out a million dollar check to give to Megan while their divorce attorneys behave like attorneys and prolong the negotiations. “Nothing about you is real,” she tells Don and gives him back the engagement ring that came from Don Draper’s real wife and widow. “You’re nothing but a liar – an aging, sloppy, selfish liar,” Megan says. Well, OK, but she deserves better lines. . . and the point about Don has been made and need not be emphasized at such moments.

It surprised me that art director Stan’s girlfriend Elaine is so loving and so adventurous, willing to pose in the nude for his photographic portfolio.He turns out to be a nice guy -- after such an unpromising start. . . .

It surprised me that Megan has a sister. Can’t see the advantage of introducing her now, but who knows?

It doesn’t surprise me that Megan’s mother would call on Roger Sterling to do a service for her. . .a service combining money (Marie needs him to pay $180 to Megan’s movers) and desire (“please take advantage of me,” she says breathily),

It surprised me to encounter hustler Pima, the photographer with the great reputation, who will do anything with either Peggy or Stan or both to get a lucrative assignment . . I don’t see a future for her, but I’m not plotting the show.

If I were, well, I am missing Sally, hoping for a reprise of Dr. Faye Miller, maybe a flashback of art director Sal or crazy Krishna Paul, and a return to the office of Michael Ginsberg.

If they asked me I’d want a major advertising crisis – the need to satisfy a well-heeled but hopelessly resistant client, an ingenious solution to a thorny problem.

If it were up to me. . . but it isn’t. Who, by the way, is singing “C’est Si Bon” over the closing credits? Henri Betti?

What did you make of the episode?

Love,

David

Dear David,

Speaking of being born again: Betty scared the bejesus out of me in that opening scene where Don was babysitting at Henry and Betty's house, making chocolate milkshakes for his and Betty's little boys. How did she terrify me? By declaring that she was going back to school for a master's degree in psychology, aiming to re-invent herself as some kind of counselor or therapist. Can you imagine having a shrink who looks like Grace Kelly, only aggressively sexier, and who has the poor impulse control and unchecked, rabid narcissism of a sulky four year old?

David, I heartily second your plea to the admired Matt Weiner: "DON"T GO ALL MORAL ON US" Don't "punish" Don for being Don in concluding Mad Men. That would be an expected, tidy exit strategy unworthy of that character, the series or your audience.

This episode's color scheme seemed to be warm earth tones, hovering around the red, orange, red-brown and rust part of the spectrum. Remember Pete's hilarious tomato red golf sweater, Don's dark red shirt in the initial milkshake scene, and Betty's peach print gown in that same scene? Stan and Harry are clad mostly in brown this episode, Peggy 2/3rds of the time in orange, and rust red (and once in green to disrupt my scheme); Meredith in buttercup yellow, and then an orange jumper. Pima carries a bright red umbrella in the scene where she tries to seduce Peggy. Megan wears a very fetching rust colored dress in the fancy hotel room she and her sister and mother occupy in Manhattan, in contrast to her sister's dowdier (by comparison) brown frock. Don's bedroom is deep red. Stan and Pima presumably have sex in the weird red light of the darkroom. Sultry waitress Diana's now has a brown-red uniform (matching the color scheme of the more upscale steakhouse she seems to have graduated to from the coffee shop.) The walls of her crummy hotel room are red orange, complete with red bedspread, in the scene where the episode grimly ends.

Speaking of Diana, this hot bit of speculation just in from tenured professor of Mad Men studies Denise Duhamel:

A friend obsessed with the show said that there is a theory that Diana, the waitress, could be Don's DAUGHTER!

Remember when he was raped in the whorehouse?

I really doubt that would be the case, but why would Mad Men bring her Diana in and drop her, when all I want is more Peggy, Joan, Betty, and especially SALLY?

Indeed, the question on everyone's lips is "Whither Sally???" And thanks, learned colleague Denise Duhamel (who shares initials with Don Draper! Could this be one of the factors that initially drew professor Duhamel to this important field of research, in which she has so distinguished herself in recent years? If waitress Diana is indeed Don's Daughter, then one version of her maiden name would be Diana Draper, another set of nicely alliterative initials to monogram her leather luggage with, should she ever have enough dough to buy any.)

Favorite line of the episode: probably the one delivered by Harry Crane in the squirm- worthy scene you referred to, David, where Harry tries, with the suaveness of Sasquatch, to put the old casting couch make on Megan. Never has poor Harry acted like more of a cad (perhaps he was still smarting from being referred to as "Mr. Potato Head" by an unkind client in last week's installment.) Reeling from how gorgeous Megan looks when she joins him for lunch at a snazzy hotel restaurant, he gapes and gasps: "You're like Ali McGraw and Brigit Bardot had a baby!" (Perfect description of actress Jessica Pare in this part.)

Things I loved about this episode:

1. Roger's code for the clients who are "blotto after lunch:" N.A.C. NO AFTERNOON CALLS.

2. When Don is nuzzling Diana, he murmurs, "You smell incredible. What is that?" and she replies dryly, though also a bit dreamily, as Don's nose is gently snuffling her hair, "shampoo." (She continues after that, talking about how it's Avon shampoo, remarking "I bought it in my living room," perhaps setting us up for door to door sales of cosmetics as a business model Don's agency may take an interest in?)

3. In Pima's photo shoot for a Vermouth commercial, all the models seem to be dressed like sexy witches.

This episode is not unique in featuring lying as theme. One might even say that to the cynical among us, lying is a foundational concern of the show, as all advertising could be viewed as a form of lying. Diana fibs to Don about being childless, then later confesses "I lied to you." Don responds wonderfully, with a tender, quizzical "Already?" When Peggy tells Stan that Pima made a pass at her, too, and that she's a hustler, he growls "I don't believe you." Peggy looks him in the eye and says, "Which part?" When Roger asks Megan's mother if Don really agreed to Megan taking every stick of furniture from their formerly shared apartment and ship it to California, she says he did. Stan's wife asks how Pima liked his cheesecake photos of her, and he responds, "She loved them." As you noted, when finalizing their divorce, Megan calls Don an aging, sloppy, selfish liar, when actually, he's probably the least dissembling main character featured in this episode.

April 12, 2015

OK, let’s get our bearings. The more things stay the same, the more they change – on the surface at least. Peggy Lee sings “Is That All There Is?” while Peggy Olsen’s midriff expands; hem lines are going up and these boots were made for walking; the tension between Peggy and Joan gets more intense; the transformation of Ken Cosgrove from nice guy with level head to one-eyed sourpuss continues apace; and the guys usher in the dawn of the worst decade of male fashion with ugly mustaches – Roger’s white stache in the Rollie Fingers mode; even worse, perhaps, Ted’s big brown concession to the Zeitgeist.

The trio of oversexed McCann ad men who can’t get enough of Joan’s panties, hose, and bra: did we (men) really behave that crudely back then? (Don’t answer.) And if, onomastically, Harry Crane echoes Hart Crane, and Dick Whitman evokes Walt, and Michael Ginsberg recalls Allen, then meek John Mathis in the flesh, who reports to Peggy and matches her up with his brother-in-law, will disappoint all of us who made out to Johnny Mathis singing “Chances Are” and “It’s Not for Me to Say” in suburban cellars prepping for the high school prom in 1966. I have never before used the word onomastically in a sentence.

Things have changed on the Semitism front at least. The dark-haired waitress waiting on Don, Roger, and three female accomplices in a diner – the waitress named Di – reminds our boy of Rachel Katz, nee Menken, and the first of the last episodes of “Mad Men” go right back to episode one of season one when the heiress of Menken’s department stores gets treated rudely by Don and company in the then-judenrein firm of Sterling and Cooper. In a dream Rachel is one of the models auditioning for the chinchilla ad that the agency is planning. In the most memorable dialogue of the week, she tells Don “I’m supposed to tell you you missed your flight” and he replies with the over-sincerity of a commercial: “Rachel, you’re not just smooth, you’re Wilkinson smooth.”

Rachel Menken has died of leukemia. It happened just a week ago. Don is stunned; he pays a shiva visit to Rachel’s sister Barbara, who needs not explain what this seven-day period of mourning entails. Don knows. He has, he says, lived in New York for a long time. Barbara’s husband: “We need one more for a minyan.” Don: “I’ll be glad to help.” Barbara: “He can’t. He’s not Jewish.” The men doven while he stands in the vestibule looking on. You think of the Jews we have met since Nixon and Kennedy faced off in series one: Jane Siegel, who marries Roger; Jane’s pint-sized cousin, butt of jokes, mocked incessantly by Roger until he deftly aims a punch at Roger’s solar plexus; Abe who loves Peggy; Ginsberg, crazy as a loon but right up there with Don and Peggy in the copywriting department; foul-mouthed comedian Jimmy Barrett and his wife, Bobbie. Don has slept with Bobbie, he has slept with Rachel, and it could be that the antidote to anti-Semitism is good sex. As Ava Gardner put it, when accounting for why she and Sinatra fought constantly yet played their romance through to its end, “If a man’s good in the feathers, you can forgive a lot.”

Meanwhile, Don remains the Lothario de ses jours, shtupping the waitress in an alley and topping a midnight visitor on a wine-stained carpet. In the immortal words of every TV critic in America, Does he know who he is? Will he ever find out? And how will it end? Will he jump? Will he fall? The last two questions reveal too literal a reading of the opening credits and should be disregarded. To the first two questions: Sure. He’s the guy who radiates confidence when he sells you a Mercedes. “The best – or nothing.”

Love,

D.

Dear David,

You are right to open the discussion saying Let’s Get Our Bearings. I needed that! I feel like I’ve been hibernating in a badly ventilated cave. It’s bad for my health to go too long without our favorite TV series. As Mad Men scholar Brian Tucker was quick to remind me, when I puddingheadedly remarked that this final-season opener, with its quick jumps between a multitude of story lines, felt very all over the place, so in media res…..this final season was broken into two parts by the network, and was originally intended to be one long farewell season of fourteen or so episodes, rather than two installments of seven episodes with an intervening intermission of more than a year. So I need to get my head right and get up to SPEED.

As many thumbs up as I can muster in agreement with your observation about the utter hideousness of mustaches of the period. Oh, horrid ornaments of facial hair, marring the visages of two perfectly good-looking male characters! I gasped when I saw Roger re-enter the Edward Hopper-esque coffee shop from the john. Good god, he’s turned into a catfish! Or has pigeon wings glued to his upper lip! It’s impossible to look at him or Ted now without laughing.

Sea green seemed to be this episode's color theme. The stewardess who Don beds on the floor has a sea green mini dress on (is it her flight uniform?) and rapidly reveals a lovely diaphanous sea green panty and bra set. The waitresses in the coffee shop featured in this episode wear sea green uniforms with white caps and aprons. Peggy is clad in a flattering sea green cocktail dress with color coordinated jacket for her date with underling Mathis’ brother in law. When they go back to her apartment after the date has turned from awkward to hot, there is a metallic sea green typewriter visible on Peggy’s desk as they make out and talk about zipping off to Paris. Though I read that technically the gem can come in many colors, maybe all the sea green in this episode is TOPAZ, a jewel I’m most familiar with being aqua or blue green, and of course that is the brand name of the pantyhose whose on account Joan and Peggy are made to suffer so ignominiously. (More on that in a second.) To conclude the costume commentary: the three babes Roger and Don are shoehorned into the coffee shop booth with (after some swank affair that has the men sporting tuxes) are arrayed in evening frocks, long and short, that are dead ringers for gowns my barbie doll had when I was a tot. That really took me back, making me relive muscle memory of stuffing that barbie doll’s hard little plastic body into those glamorous tiny dresses whose life-size versions I thought would be a big part of my future as an adult woman. Au contraire. I have never worn an evening gown or evening gloves in my life. The era for that ended, at least in my milieu and tax bracket, long before I hit adulthood. It was all about blue jeans and peasant blouses and loose granny dresses by the time I got old enough to put my dolls in a drawer and to be more concerned with my own outfits than Barbie’s. I love that the waitress is reading John Dos Passos’ USA trilogy, that weighty paperback crammed into her apron pocket.

I think we’re in 1969. It’s “The End of an Era” we’re told in Mad Men print ads and on billboards, both because the show (sob!!!!) is coming to an end, and also, I think, because the sixties are drawing to a close. I conclude this, because:

1. That’s the year Peggy Lee had a hit with “Is That All There Is?” the wry, doleful, existential ballad of ultimate underwhel-ment that bookends this episode

2. That’s also the year that President Richard Nixon announced on TV that there would be a substantial drawdown of American troops from the war in Vietnam. We see and hear Don watching such an announcement in a super brief scene towards the end of the show (though there were many such announcements in the run up to the end of the war, so this date is hard to pinpoint.)

The scene in which Peggy and Joan try to get the trio of McCann Erikson male creeps to agree to OK a deal in which Marshall Fields Dept. store lends its elevating name to Topaz panty hose is indeed chilling. Those guys torture them, clearly showing off for each other and competing to be named winner of the Lowlife Misogynist Slime award (except the poor guy on the end who has no lines!). The interchange between Peggy and Joan in the elevator immediately following is maybe my favorite scene in the episode. Trapped literally and metaphorically in a tiny claustrophobic space, the two begin decompressing from their harassment in a way that starts off sounding like commiseration, but quickly degenerates. Peggy, continuing her understandable and common but misbegotten conflation of longing to be taken seriously and having to take on the oppressor’s mind set, ends up telling Joan that she is partly responsible for the harassment because “you can’t dress the way you do” and not expect to incite this kind of behavior from men in a professional setting, or out in the world. They end up attacking each other, yet also paradoxically giving each other permission to bust a move that may or may not be to each woman’s benefit. When Joan retaliates, telling Peggy that of course Peggy doesn’t dress the way she (Joan) does, because (by implication) Peggy is more Plain Jane than Bombshell--Peggy doesn’t have the looks to carry off the stunning, figure-hugging clothes Joan wears, Peggy is devastated. Later, she reverses her decision not to allow herself to be set up on a blind date by Mathis, almost to prove Joan wrong, to challenge the idea that she’s unattractive, or that she isn’t as attractive as Joan. When Peggy insults Joan back, saying, “You’re filthy rich, you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to,” (because Joan, unlike Peggy, is now a partner in the firm) Joan thinks about it hard. When one of the McCann Erikson creeps calls later in the day, she tells her secretary to say she’s unavailable, in a meeting. Then she flees work and indulges in a high end shopping spree: evening dresses, shoes, boots, the works. (More wardrobe designs straight out of my old barbie doll’s cardboard closet. Sigh.)

Ken is also tortured, by Roger and another jerk from McCann Erikson. (Does anyone decent work at McCann Erikson or is the firm’s roll call just wall-to-wall assholes?) The duo team up to fire Ken in a vicious way, seeming to want to cause maximum pain, and relishing it, making jokes. They add insult to injury, letting Ken know that his severance package is tied to his “gift wrapping” (Ken’s term, later) his accounts for Pete to take over. Yet at the end of the show, Ken takes a very tasty revenge. His retiring father in law has made him head of advertising at huge Dow Chemical, enabling him to tell Roger and Peter: “I’m going to be your client, and I hate to tell you but I’m very hard to please.” Which elicits an expected expletive from Pete. Would that Peggy and Joan could get some of their own back too, sticking it to their sadistic sexist abusers!

Don’s Don Juan antics are important in this episode, as in so many. We get two contrasting amorous scenes. Drunk, wine spilling and therefore carpet ruining sex with the cute stewardess in his lavish apartment. Quick, up against the wall sex in a dark alley with the waitress who reminds him of his dead love Rachel. Rachel who he has prophetically just dreamed of, and then learned she is recently dead. Rachel whose wake he briefly appears at before being triply snubbed (for not being Jewish, for being out of touch with her, and for being a cad towards her when she was alive) and then unceremoniously handed his hat. He ends up haunting the coffee shop, talking to his waitress about Rachel in very, spacey abstract terms. She’s a little sympathetic, but eventually tells him, “That [i.e., sex] isn’t going to happen again. Next time you come in, bring a date. I just work here.” The most eligible almost bachelor in 1969 Manhattan, shunned by his old love’s sister at her memorial, rejected by the coffee shop waitress, ends this episode looking ever handsome but bewildered, and forlorn. Cue Peggy Lee.

May 24, 2014

Twinnings: parallel lines that meet somewhere between the cross-country plane and the clouds above. I'll list a few.

Peggy has just turned thirty, and Joan is nearing forty. No fear could quite compare with the fear of becoming an old maid.

On the flight back to LA are Megan and Pete’s fuck-bunny Bonnie, for whom Pete is not quite Clyde enough, and both are disconsolate for one reason or another.

Stephanie Paterik tells me that when Roger and daughter rough it in the Catskills, Dad and offspring adopt identical sleep postures. That was two episodes ago.

And this week, when the episode concludes with Don and Peggy and Pete at a Burger Chain, their formation echoes the visual configuration of Ted, Peggy, and Pete a year earlier at the airport lounge where they sit and everyone but Ted laughs, because everyone but Ted has been drinking whisky sours, and Ted is about to fly them in his little plane and catch hell from his wife -- only in the Ted episode it's a triangle and here it's more like Don and Peggy on one team and Pete on the other.

Prejudices persist. When Bob Benson bails out the handcuffed GM executive who “tried to fellate an undercover police officer,” the cop on duty says, “good night, ladies.” And when Bob – the only character who looks good in a plaid jacket – says he “struck out” yesterday when looking for a suitable present for Joan, her mother pipes up: “The Jews close everything on Saturday.”

This one-time shomer Shabbat yeshiva boy wonders: can the office be as judenrein as it was back in the benighted days of 1960? Gone are Ginsberg, to the loony bin; likewise the secretary who married Roger, took acid with him, won a big divorce settlement, and why can’t I remember her name? And then there's the latter's cousin, the pint-sized copywriter who went west, grew facial hair, went Hollywood, and after enduring one taunt too many, socked Roger in the solar plexus in season six.

Is Megan having an affair? Stacey said so as soon as she heard Don offer to bring a suitcase of her stuff (a fondue maker!) when he visits her next in LA, end of July, to which she replies she’d like them to meet somewhere else – “Not LA, not here, just us.”

The episode centers on Peggy and how she will handle the creative work for the national Burger Chef campaign. Pete imagines he is praising Peggy when he says there isn’t a better woman in the ad business – but she, and we, hear it as a left-handed compliment. Though the presentation gets Lou's approval, she knows there is something wrong with her family-friendly sequence of guilty mom, indulging dad, and hungry kids in the car. So what does she do? Light up a cigarette, have a drink, chew out an associate – just like the master himself.

Everything leads up to the heart-to-heart with Don. “Now I’m one of those women who lie about their age. I hate them.” She wonders, “What did I do wrong?” He answers, “You’re doing great.” In an epiphany that doesn’t quite announce itself as such, she asks, “Does this family exist anymore?” by which she means the family toward which she has pitched her ad – a family that eats as a group rather than watching television alone together. “What if there was a place you could go and there was no TV and you could break bread and anyone you were with was family?” And then on the radio comes the familiar opening chords of Frank Sinatra singing “My Way,” his mega-hit of 1969. “And now the end is near.” And Don and Peggy dance. (Will they end up together? Maybe, said Ron and David. No way, said Yoav and Stacey.) But taking her cue from the familiar voice, she will do the ad her way.

The literary allusion in the last scene is masterly. Pete and Peggy and Don sit at a Burger Chef. In a way each is a loser (and remember, even Sinatra in “My Way” says he is “tired of losing”), they come from very different backgrounds, yet they form a sort of family. She is going to have her ad shot here, because, she tells Pete, it’s “a clean, well-lighted place.” “Okay, Hemingway,” Pete has the wit to reply. In “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” one of Hemingway’s finest stories, the setting is a café in Madrid, where men in quiet desperation go to drown their sorrows. They believe in nothing, they do the most drastic things, like trying to take their lives, for nothing, because nothing matters. Nada. In one of Hemingway’s bravura performances, the word “nada” orchestrates a paragraph. In the mind of the waiter closing the café at two in the morning the word “nada” replaces the nouns in the Lord’s Prayer and the Hail Mary. “Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name thy kingdom nada thy will be nada in nada as it is in nada.”

It is the use of one literary allusion to counter another: Lou (who, according to a friend of mine, an advertising veteran, is the most believable character in the whole show) has responded enthusiastically to the original ad Peggy drew up for Burger Chef. “It’s good to see family happiness again,” he says, and the line’s true significance becomes clear when you take it into account that “Family Happiness” is the title of a novella by Tolstoy.

The ironies are multiple. An American fast-food joint takes the place of the Spanish café with the zinc bar and the brandy drinks that sound so exotic in a foreign tongue. Yet the nihilistic desperation is the same, even if Don, Peggy, and Pete smile gamely in the artificial camaraderie of their work.

There's my report, dear Amy. And I never even got around to Joan’s defiant response to Bob Benson’s proposal.

-- DL

On Fri, May 23, 2014 at 9:17 PM Amy Gerstler wrote:

Dear David,

(You continue to field musical and literary allusions popping up in our favorite show with the alacrity of a legendary outfielder, a Raul Mondesi, or perhaps a Dusty Baker.) THE FAMILY EPISODE:(could this theme have been writ any larger?) We began this episode with Peggy and cute, nerdy male office minion doing market research in the Burger Chef parking lot after sundown. The scene looked very B movie-- shadowy, streetlit. A beleaguered mom with kids roiling in back seat of her car hurriedly answers Peggy’s queries about her family’s fast food habits, eyes glued to the ten dollar bill she’s been promised. The birth of the focus group? Oh, America, whither thou goest?! So Peggy starts on the outside, standing uncomfortably, peering into a car in a dark, trying to keep her voice smiley and bright whilst gripping her clipboard, straining to get the data she needs. As you point out, by episode’s end she has moved into the light, sitting in the blindingly over-lit Burger Chef interior, in a booth with a pair of key members of her work “family.” The man who she lost her virginity to, whose baby she bore and gave away (Pete) and the man who has been her symbolic father, her mentor, who she desperately wants to be (Don.) Don’s small, wordless motion to Pete in the last moment of that scene, indicating to that egotistical blockhead (Vincent Kartheiser is soooo brilliant at playing narcissism) that he has a smear of catsup on his upper lip, is beautiful. It’s familial, intimate, and at the same time a bit condescending and smirky.Speaking of family, Joan bravely fends off a marriage proposal from a gay colleague, Bob Benson, who wants her to be his “beard.” His offer to make a kind of alternative family with her, and be a father to her tiny son, while allowing both adults to pursue separate sex lives, doesn’t appeal to her. “We could comfort each other through an uncertain world,” Bob says, coaxingly. He even offers her a ring, a sort of image rhyme with the notorious scene in last week’s episode, in which poor demented Ginsberg, now in the loony bin, offers Peggy his lopped off nipple in a little jeweler’s box. Bob’s proposal quickly turns to a less-than-kind hard sell when Joan balks. “I am offering you,” Bob says rather loftily, “more than anyone else ever will.” I found Joan noble in this scene. “No, you’re not,” she demures, “because I want love, and you should, too.” Joan’s hard-won dignity is a radiant element of her considerable beauty.Speaking of the varieties of love (or high altitude lust): Pete and his paramor Bonnie’s retreat into an airport bathroom at 30,000 feet for a quickie put me in mind of a paperback that was in heavy rotation amongst Junior High school girls I knew back in 1969, the year this season of Mad Men takes place. The book, which came out in 1967, is Coffee, Tea or Me. It purported to be a memoir chronicling the sexual adventures of a pair of randy young stewardesses. Later, the “memoir” was revealed to be the concoction of a PR dude called Donald Bain. Predictably, we pre-teen and teenage girls were ravenous all during secondary school to get our hands on any book that mentioned sex. The Happy Hooker (1971), The Godfather (1969, I forget which specific chapter, none of us read any other parts of the book, I’m afraid) and The Harrad Experiment (1962) were a few of the extracurricular titles that joined the immortal Coffee, Tea or Me on our secret mandatory reading list. I do have a growing fear that someone in this series is going to die in plane crash. Sometimes I read the gorgeous opening/credits sequence, where Don is falling, falling, falling, that way. I hope I am wrong.Stan is wearing love beads to the office! I still think he has a yen for Peggy. They seem to understand each other on deep levels, and perhaps it’s symbolic that during a phone conversation about work Stan is eating a banana and his shirt is open to his navel. I know everyone and their cousin thinks that Peggy is going to sleep with Don. Maybe she will. I think she should sleep with Stan. There. I’ve said it. If only Stan could have been a fly on the wall, an invisible witness to the scene in which Peggy, unable to sleep because she knows she has to totally rework the Burger Chef pitch, does a sexy little jog across the room when she gets up in her semi transparent nightie, he might not be able to hold back any longer.Later in the show, Pete grumbles, “I hate the word family.” Well may he say so. He has been absent from his little daughter Tammy’s short life so long she doesn’t recognize him. When he comes to visit, she refuses to come out from behind her nanny’s skirts, and is frightened of him as she might be of an intruder. Pete waits around after his paternal visit, after putting his daughter to bed, for ex-wife Trudy to come back from a date, getting smashed on her booze. He confronts her drunkenly and is so belligerent she eventually says, “You’re not a part of this family anymore.” Footnote one: Correspondent Benjamin Weissman informs interested viewers that actor John Slattery, who plays Roger Sterling, looks buff in his steam room scene this episode because he’s a real life surfer. For his own safety, we hope Mr. Slattery wears more than a gym towel when riding the big waves (there are SHARKS out there, John!) Speaking of sharks, the dialogue in that steam room is pretty vicious, quite biting.Footnote two, in closing speaking again of family: My mother in law as absolutely swooning over the scene where Don and Peggy slow dance. OOOOh, she sighed. He was so tender with her. She seemed so overcome that I ran to the medicine cabinet for the smelling salts, in case they were needed, but that wonderful lady kept her head. That’s all till next week.

-- Everyone hates Lou, the boss from hell, whom most of us know all too well, and how awful will he get?

-- Lots of people are wondering “how Don will die,” as if his death were a foregone conclusion and all that is in question is the means: will he jump from a tall building or turn into a drug-addled beach bum wasting away and finally drowning one summer day in some shabby Florida town?

-- Why did the magnificent Jessica Parre, toothily grinning, pose nude in a swimming pool and panty-clad in the kitchen for an Esquire photo shoot?

As you are not featured in the episode, my dear Joan, it was awfully kind of you to come over and watch it with us, knowing, as you did, that questions one and three would answer themselves. Here, as promised, are the notes I took, the observations you and I and Stacey made, so you can share them with Bob Benson.

I notice that Don spells out “strategy” to open the episode, which closes with his unexpected appearance at a strategy session for a cigarette manufacturer at the Algonquin.

Stacey, also present, gets points for noting the symmetry in wifely party-giving: Betty Draper throws one and so does Megan Draper, on different coasts, with different costs, casts, and results.

Speaking of symmetry, when Lou sadistically keeps Don from taking his flight to Los Angeles, he says he’s going to “tuck you in” for the night – the same locution used by Megan’s friend Amy when she initiates the threesome with Megan and Don after the party in LA, where he flies to comfort his niece – that is, Anna Draper’s niece, Stephanie, seven months pregnant – but whom he never sees, because Megan, jealous of the affection her husband has for the girl, sends her on her way, albeit with a check for a thousand dollars. “I know all his secrets,” Stephanie artlessly says, pushing Megan over the edge.

You were right, Joan: when you consider the sexual shenanigans, it’s hard to get worked up over the Esquire photo shoot. Anyway, even at her meanest, Megan is a lot easier to take than Betty, on whom Henry finally loses his temper. Betty remains in favor of the war in Vietnam when even Nixon goes on record wanting it to end.

Lou, sealing his status as a certified asshole, turns out to be a cartoonist (“Scout’s Honor”), who compares himself to Bob Dylan (!), rhetorically asking a room of incredulous associates, “Is he hip enough for you?” And then to clinch the deal: “You’re a bunch of flag-burning snots.” Ugh.

“Hip,” also “out of sight,” “bread,” “solid,” “dealing grass,” are among the week’s linguistic markers, and Amy says she is going “to split” meaning “to leave” the morning after she and Megan and Don share the connubial bed. As for fashion, there are the hideous plaid sports jackets that even Don dons, and Harry Crane sports an ascot where a tie should go, while a bearded Stan, joint in mouth, wears a bandanna in the same place.

But more on Lou, whom I dislike so much I feel sorry for friends of mine named Lou who spell it that way. Best line of the night comes when Lou, disgusted with his whole staff, asks Don whether he should let them all go (whether for the night or for good). “I’d let you go, Lou,” says our dapper hero (in real life an avid St. Louis Cardinals fan, but we who root for the Dodgers or Mets won’t hold that against him.) The sadistic shithead leaves the office and lets Don know that he can wait until Monday for the work, after all.

Oh, those days of joints everywhere, of Blood, Sweat, and Tears on the radio, of musicians who drop out of Berkeley and get busted for dealing dope, of adult content and sexual situations, of girls wearing hair bands or sword-fighting with golf clubs, and, alas, of guys named Ginsberg who flip out and get carted off to the nut house. Cutting off one of his nipples and presenting it to Peggy in a gift box takes the cake for sincere craziness. But in this very satisfying episode, he is also responsible for perhaps the cleverest most ‘69 moment, so to speak. It happens when he spies on Cutler and Lou talking and watches their mouths move, imagining what they are saying – just as Hal the computer reads the astronauts’ lips in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001, released in 1968 but on wide screens everywhere a year later.

Joan, I do not think Don is going to jump out of a window, or die on a deserted beach. I think we get a glimpse of his future when he barges into the Algonquin and offers to resign from the firm if it means the Philip Morris account. And then he turns into Don Draper, the man who can sell any concept to any executive, who has worked ten years on tobacco and is the only cigarette man who has conferred with the opposition and arranged a “stay of execution” for the industry in 60, in 62, in 64 and 65. Makes my hand go reflexively to my breast pocket and pluck out an unfiltered Lucky to light up.

Yours in sincere admiration,

Dapper Dave, author of “The Drape(r)s of Roth”

PS Speaking of nipples, did you see Rihanna’s on Instagram?

On Tue, May 13, 2014 at 11:26 PM Amy Gerstler wrote:

Mad Men “The Runaways.”

I am worried sick about Ginsberg. I fear our resident, wisecracking Jew is going to be subjected to shock treatment, and perhaps thereby be silenced, leaving an entirely goyishe office. He has been descending into something like paranoid schizophrenia since the season began. (Wonderful acting job by Ben Feldman!! Looks like he’s lost weight, his face intermittently flushed as though he were coming down with scarlet fever, and he seemed persecuted even by his own dark, handlebar mustache, as though by some tarantula.) As you recounted, poor Peggy had to be the one to make the call and have him hospitalized, after he sliced off his nipple and offered it to her in a bracelet box. Peggy being an (ex?) Catholic, there was something straight out of the lives of the martyrs about that self mutilation / lovingly proffered body part (which made Peggy scream.) The later shot of her puffy, pink, tearstained face as she watches Ginsberg being rolled down a hospital hallway, strapped to a gurney, still wildly gesticulating and blabbing, gave us a glimpse of a former, more tender-hearted Peggy I have to admit I miss, though I well understand it’s better for dramatic development, for intensity of character and storylike, etc. etc. if she continues on her path of becoming Don’s Dark Sister. But when was the last time Peggy looked sorry for or fond of anyone? It was high time. (There’s still no silver bullet for treating schizophrenia, if that’s how Ginsberg ends up getting diagnosed, and back in 1969 options were fewer and grimmer. Will he be forcefed Thorazine? (Lit Footnote, just cuz I looked this stuff up: One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest was published in1975, and Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar didn’t come out in the US till 1971, after it’d appeared in England at first under a pseudonym.) I was hoping it would to come light that Ginsberg had merely been dropping tons of acid. Alas, it appears to be something more insidious. (All this evokes, as you so rightly note, another family of highly verbal, east coast Ginsberg’s travails.)

Mad magazine (who can resist this confluence of Mad Men and Mad magazine) but felt that the most spot-on reference, to George Baker’s Sad Sack, remained unmentioned. There’s a giddy, cruel, boyish, schoolyard atmosphere that pervades these scenes. The school bully (Lou) is found out to have a vulnerable point (his secret life as a comics artist) and for a while the younger boys of the creative team take merciless, giggling advantage, unable to stop mocking him behind his back (or so they think) even while taking a leak (the revelation of the sketches being an inadvertant “leak” of another sort, I suppose.)

AND: Here’s a toast to Betty’s contribution to the ‘progressive dinner,’ where guests move from house to house to sample various courses (at which she demonstrates her decidedly unprogressive politics! as you noted, situating herself to the right of even 1969 vintage Richard Nixon, not to mention her politically ambitious husband.) Oh! but I drink here to the fussy and disgusting foods of the era: crab louie on toast points (not so bad), rumaki (one of the grossest culinary inventions of all time, in the opinion of this lifelong liver-hater) and “little franks in barbeque sauce” (not recommended by the surgeon general). For the uninitiated, since I’m old enough to remember rumaki and to have been severely traumatized by it (“Just taste it! That’s all you have to do…”) here’s a typical ingredient list for that dreaded hors d’oeuvre (in case you think I’m harshing Betty’s buzz unnecessarily.) a 4 oz. can of water chestnuts, drained and sliced 1 cup teriyaki sauce 1/2 teaspoon minced fresh ginger root 12 ounces fresh chicken livers, halved a teaspoon of minced garlic12 slices bacon 1 quart oil for frying

There are recipes aplenty online if this appeals to you. ENJOY!

Sally’s broken nose seems a symbolic precursor to loss of virgnity. Was she telling the truth about how it happened? I liked the intimate scene between her and younger brother Bobby if for no other reason than we’ve never really seen them join forces before. Sally’s escaped to boarding school but poor Bobby is stuck watching his beautiful, angry, twisted up mother smolder and fume through the ides of her second marriage and grow restless in the throes of a kind of incipient feminism which is not reacting well with her knee jerk reactionary tendencies. “I have a stomach ache all the time” Bobbie says to his big sister in a small voice, and “the other night they were really screaming at each other.” Poor kid.

I am jonesing for more Joan. Not happy when she’s absent. I am wondering if the appearance of Don’s pregnant hippie “niece” (speaking of plot harbingers) is somehow a teaser for the fact that Megan will find herself pregnant before the series is through. I hope Don doesn’t die at all, and especially that he doesn’t die of lung cancer. I LOVE the way he whistles for a taxi.

Till next week! I am already having withdrawal symptoms! How can there be so few episodes left this season????

This is the voice of Don Draper offering you "exceptional deals" on the Mercedes of your dreams. Our "breakthroughs in design" are sure to capture your custom in competition with the other cars that are paying for our time this week: Audi, the Ram 1500 truck from Dodge, Lincoln town cars, and 2013 Hondas. Take that, fat vulgar Jersey Jaguar-dealing fucker of Joan.

Speaking of cars, I see Trudy getting into a town car just to go half a block home. Still the princess, and what glorious heels, and did I really hear her order "a deconstructed martini"? From one point of view, any martini using vodka rather than gin can be said to have been deconstructed but that's a technicality. She's selling Smirnoff though I think it would be as true of Belvedere and Grey Goose. But that's just me. I believe Roger drinks vodka martinis. Back in the day (before "back in the day" was idiomatic) he specified Wolfschmidt's as his brand of choice. Imagine that.

The inevitable happens right on schedule. The marriage cannot last, but Don, content to let things be, makes Megan announce the demise just as he had done previously with Betty and Sylvia. He does reject Faye, of course, but usually he likes it when the girl says goodbye and cries on the phone and looks as elegant and cool as Megan Draper in Los Angeles.

Is Don back at the agency? He has done what anyone wanting a raise is advised to do: get an offer from another firm. I have never seen Roger Sterling so animated as when he speaks in passionate defense of Don. He resorts to legalisms. We didn't fire him, we put him on leave. It is up to the partners and they will vote against Don except for the clinching argument: money. As a partner Don must be bought out, and the others can't afford that. Besides (Roger shrewdly adds) how would you like to court a client and pass Don in the hall with Mary Wells on his lap?

So Don is back in the firm. Bert says so, leaving the "stipulations" for Joan to enumerate: No drinking in the office ("outside of client hospitality" -- a nice loophole). You must stick to the script (which must be approved by the partners) in presentations and you are never to be left alone with a client. Worst of all, you will report to Lou. To Lou!

What can he say but yes? He will (as Stacey observes) make short work of Lou.

There is an undercurrent of melancholy. Stan: "What are you doing here?" Joan: "What a pleasant surprise. . .What are you doing here?" The carousel in Central Park reminds one-eyed Ken Cosgrove of Don -- a reference to the latter's greatest triumph: the "carousel" wheel for Kodak. Peggy, defiant: "We didn't miss you." To which he sighs, and what else can he say but Thank you?

My prediction. The elegies are premature. Whatever happens now will feel original but will secretly repeat something that has already happened -- just as, when he dines with prospective employers, a beautiful blonde appears, announces her name ("Emily Arnett") and her hotel room ("top floor next to the elevator"). Just his type, too.

But when we see him enter a hotel room it is not hers but Roger's. He is intent on going back to the firm and being the genius that everyone else in advertising wants to be. He even sheds his hat and dons a hatless raincoat look.

Meanwhile, some things don't change, even though the daughters of farmers have shed their bras. Betty Draper's kids will always hate her.

Love,

Harold (Harry) Crane, head of media, the most dishonest man in Jim Cutler’s entire experience of advertising, and will I lose my job as a result?

Do you believe Megan Draper is the “new woman” and Betty Draper-Francis the old, foundation garment wearing model?

What movie is Don Draper watching at the opening of this episode? It looks like an Antonioni movie, but there is also a whiff of San Francisco about it, n’est-ce pas?

What do you think will happen to Dawn if she EVER EVER puts Don on hold again???

Is there a more heart squeezing sound and sight on television in the year of our lord 2014 than Don Draper apologizing during a late night coast to coast phone call?

Does Stan have a crush on Peggy, regardless of how nasty, brittle, self concerned, competitive and vindictive our once innocent Peggy has become? He is nicer to her than anyone else can bring themselves to be, and seems to have a hide as thick as a rhino’s when it comes to withstanding her increasingly caustic, withering remarks.

Is it a surprise or to be expected that Don is a terrible flower arranger? The impatient way he flops into a vase the bouquet he bought Megan after he flies to LA and is waiting to surprise her in her LA hideaway made the Japanese Ikebana-ist within this student of Les Hommes Fous shudder uncontrollably.

Was there something weirdly sexy about watching Betty Draper-F. drink a sip of warm, just-squirted-from-the-cow milk out of a NOT pristine galvanized metal farm pail and then hearing her murmur shyly, after wiping her mouth on the back of her hand, with a hint of surprise in her voice, “it’s sweet!”

Are not loving a parent and hating a parent the same thing (re Betty’s saddest of the sad questions to her second husband about her children: “Why don’t they love me?”)

Will Megan end up on a Twilight Zone episode, due to her frazzled chance encounter, when assailing a director she’d auditioned for, with Rod Serling?

If so, will Matt Weiner treat us to a scene from said T. Z. episode as part of an upcoming installment of Les Hommes Fous? One can only hope.

Sincerely,

Adjunct Professor of Mad Men in Training (on her year of study abroad)

April 23, 2014

You were absent last night so I thought I'd let you know what you missed.

It is Valentine’s Day 1969. There will be two declarations of love and a lot of flowers. The amorous blonde real-estate agent, a California girl in the Beach Boys sense, tells Pete she loves his flowers and him. He's luckier than he knows. But unhappy.

The unhappiest of the lot is Peggy, who doesn’t know it’s Valentine’s Day until teammates Stan and Ginsberg point this out in the morning elevator. She thinks the roses sent to her secretary (Shirley) by her fiancé (Charles) are meant for her and must have been sent by Ted. Wishful thinking takes the form of hysteria and she sends messages to LA-based Ted -- as morose and enigmatic as ever – that he must find incomprehensible and so he ignores them. It made me review the history of her love life: Pete, Duck, the leftwing journalist she calls “the Jew” when she and her mother have a fight. That’s it.

Now there are two black secretaries. No one can tell them apart so Shirley calls Dawn Shirley, and Dawn calls Shirley Dawn. The symmetry of their situations on this day (each is transferred, but not fired, by disgruntled bosses) makes its point about the evolution of racism: from segregation and exclusion to marginalization and suspicion. I hate myself for using the word “marginalization” but am too lazy to think of something better.

Joan gets an office of her own. On relations of bosses and secretaries: “Scarlett and Harry are practically married.” Getting it on with his secretary is a longtime Harry trait. For the first time it occurs to me that Harry Crane has the same name as Harold Hart Crane but has nothing else in common with the author of “The Bridge.”

Roger gives off an air of defeat. In the street someone has said to him, “Mind your own business, Kike.” Was it because he was wearing a homburg? Who still wears a hat in 1969? Only the Jews.

Lou or Lew (who occupies Don’s office) remains clueless, insensitive. What does he do all day?

Sally Draper, beautiful in makeup, remains the truth-teller. “Do you still love Megan?” “Why don’t you tell her you don’t want to move to Los Angeles?” On the car radio as her dad drives her back to her prep school: “Eleanor” by the Turtles.

Don sleeps late, watches “The Little Rascals” and sit coms on TV, measures how much Canadian Club he’s drinking per day, pays Dawn for office info. Writes note to excuse Sally’s absence. What should he write? The truth, she says. And when she asks why he is not working, he says he told the truth about himself – but at the wrong time and place, to the wrong people. And what is the truth? “Nothing you don’t know.”

The old Don, poker-faced, tells Sally that they are going to leave the diner without paying. But it’s a joke, and they smile in recognition of the rogue impulses that link them. So when she tells her dad, before closing the car door, “Happy Valentine’s Day. I love you,” it is not just a formula she utters but. . .the truth.

Love,

Trudy [Campbell]

(I wasn't there either but turned up in a Smirnoff's commercial: "Done and done.")

On Monday, Apr 21, 2014 at 4:57 PM Amy Gerstler wrote:

Dear Trudy,

Excellent summary of the show. You did look fetching in that Smirnoff commercial (though, SORRY!, the wisdom of choosing that cheap muscle rub over, say, grey goose, absolut, Stoli, or many others (almost any other self respecting vodka!) escapes me. You truly looked grand , pretty, and relaxed with your long hair, half dancing down the liquor store aisle, and you’ve slimmed down since the baby. All this proves that you’ve only prospered since giving that philandering Pete the boot (at least we can cling to this belief till a new episode contradicts us.) Hope Tammy is doing well. Off in the wilds of distant, uncharted california, Pete’s looking jowly, paunchy and dressing like an over the hill golf pro , in case that gives you a secret twinge of vengeful pleasure.

Sally Draper wins an emmy for darkest eyebrows on a female on tv, except on occasions when a Frida Kahlo biopic is being shown. The heavy black brows suit her, and seem to be a direct genetic reference to how intensely she is spawn of Don. Yes, Sally is shaping up to be quite a beauty, not surprising given her pedigree, and at bottom, daddy’s girl.

Bout time Joan got her own office!!

Will someone please find Peggy a handsome, kind, calm, understanding, patient boyfriend? Before she brings a pistol to work or starts having to mark her liquor bottles as Don is doing, just to keep track of personal consumption. Maybe she’ll get addicted to valium?

Great double entendres about dating and sex flying across the table during Don’s well lubricated lunch with another ad man who might woo him away from his current position, eg “Don’t spoil the mood,” “I’m just looking for love” etc.

Sally’s private school pals cram into a little femmy dorm room, envying their classmate whose mother has just died...with Sally allowing as how she’d give anything to “get Betty underground.”

Lou is so repugnant (that actor is doing a great job making us hate him, with very little, few lines, no backstory at this point) that I am looking forward to some kind of horrendous disgrace befalling him soon, hopefully at the hands of a woman.

Did Roger send Joan flowers on valentine’s day, saying they were from her (their!!!) son? Were we ever given a plot twist that dispensed once and for all with Joan’s inept armed forces surgeon husband? How is her little boy? How’s her love life?

Oh Peggy! You haven’t found the way to be a generous, fair, good tempered boss. You’re channeling all the wrong parts of Don. Your innocence is turning to brittleness too soon.

Due to several categories of glitches, I was not able to watch the mad men episode till last night, hence my delay in responding to your vital 10 part query. And now we viewers have the second episode almost upon us.

1. Poor Peggy indeed. And poor Joan. When will the Mad Men bra burning/Gloria Steinem/1st wave feminist episode be aired?

2. Don's replacement is worse than a dullard, and hopefully will do something really outrageous to get himself run out of the company on a rail so Don can return, UNLESS the move is going to be to have Don start his own renegade agency, maybe in California, rescuing Peggy and Joan and a few other worthies in the process. Likely?

3. Pete is ever vile and deliciously snarky. And he looks horrid in golf shirts! Which is perfect! (or was it a tennis shirt?) How soon will Don boff the blonde real estate babe Peter had his arm around?

4. Poor Megan in so many ways! Which will destroy her first? Her marriage to Don or her having willingly walked into the maw of deepest darkest Hollywood?5. I would like to see more of the woman on plane. What are the chances? 6. I'm a little fretful about what moves Roger's daughter is going to pull now that she has "forgiven" him. I smell membership in a cult or weird religion on the horizon as the reason she's so "forgiving" now. Maybe born again? 7. Those orgies are going to sap Roger's strength. But I like his spirit of inquiry about everything. 8. I share your confusion about where Don is living now...since he's still being paid maybe he kept that swank flat? Yet with Megan's rent in Laurel Canyon or Hollywood Hills, or wherever she moved, and her not seeming to be employed in movies and TV quite yet, perhaps he's had to take a smaller cheaper place where the doors stick? What are those doors a metaphor for? 9. Yes, forest fires and coyotes...this is what passes for a portrait of California. 10. I wish you and Stacey were bi-coastal as Mad Men now seems to be!

Going to a Dodger game tonight. They are playing the Diamondbacks. Hope they squash them.